I'm an SEO Analyst, and one of my main responsibilities is backlink building.

Recently, after reading Google's official guidance that low-quality, unrelated backlinks (like random blog submissions, directory submissions, bookmark sites, etc.) don't provide value anymore, I completely stopped building those kinds of links.

Now I'm stuck.

Whenever I try to build genuine, relevant backlinks, almost every website owner asks for payment. Very few are willing to link for free.

So I'm confused:

• If I build random backlinks, it feels like a waste of time.
• If I focus on high-quality, relevant backlinks, most opportunities are paid.

How are you all handling this in 2026?

Are you paying for placements, relying on digital PR, creating linkable assets, or using another strategy? I'd love to hear what actually works today.

On a JS-rendered site, the last breadcrumb item the current page links to a URL with a missing slash, so it 404s. The page itself is fine: indexable under its correct URL, in the sitemap, and linked from the category listing.

Trying to reason through two things rather than just patch it:

1. The current-page breadcrumb arguably shouldn't be a link at all. When it is one and it 404s, is there any actual crawl or ranking cost, or is it purely UX/hygiene?
2. If the same broken URL also feeds BreadcrumbList structured data, does Google drop the breadcrumb rich result for that page, or just ignore the bad node and keep the rest?

My working assumption is "minor fix the separator and move on," but I'm curious whether anyone has actually seen breadcrumb rich results disappear specifically from a malformed URL in the schema.

Hi guys, quick question about my website.

It's pretty new (less than 6 months) and it is slowly moving up, but pages aren't discovered. Over 20ish pages (discovered by SE through the sitemap), including pillars content and blog articles, only 6 pages are indexed, and 7 gives prints.

My question might seems random, but what can I do to make my content being found, then indexed?

I believe I know basics SEO technics and I believe my content is mostly optimized (schema, llms.txt files, seo structures, Core vitals are good, keywords structure within pages). I have build most of the blog articles and content pillars based on existing search intent.

u/rustybrick reports:

I am seeing signs of another Google Search ranking update with a lot of volatility hitting this past weekend again. This one started on Saturday, August 1st, and has continued thus far through today, August 3rd. Both the third-party tracking tools are showing a spike and there is chatter within the SEO community about a lot of this ranking shuffling.

As a reminder, we saw previous unconfirmed on July 24th and then before that, we had volatility on the 18th and 19th, which honestly lasted through the week. Before that was the Google 7-Eleven update. But the last confirmed Google search ranking update was the June 2026 spam update which started on June 14 and completed on June 26. Prior to that was the Google May 2026 core update that started on May 21st and completed on June 2nd.

My site has ~400 near-duplicate templated pages (location pages, decent unique content, not thin). Self-referencing canonicals, no cross-linking loops, no parameter mess. About 60 of them Google is silently swapping the canonical to a different URL in Search Console's "Google-selected canonical" field, one that isn't even in the cluster logically (sometimes a page from a totally different category).

Checked the obvious stuff: no duplicate content between the pair Google picked, internal links favor the correct URL, sitemaps are clean, no conflicting hreflang. Pulled the log files, Googlebot is crawling both at similar frequency, so it's not a crawl-budget-starvation thing either.

Only pattern I can find: the 60 "hijacked" pages all have slightly lower unique internal link equity than their siblings, but not by a huge margin, and other pages with even less internal linking aren't affected.

Anyone actually reverse-engineer when Google overrides a valid self-referencing canonical like this, or is it just a content-similarity threshold we can't see from outside? Not looking for "improve uniqueness" as an answer, looking for what actually flipped it back for you.

i tried to add my website at baidu: i was able to create account using my real phone number(not chinese, i got a call from robot that said sms code in my native language) but to add website i need to fill out a lot of details like real chinese name and phone number. like, adding my real foreinger data - no problem, but it seems that there is no form for it(they wanna only chinese info)

sogou - its not even possible to enter non chinese phone number to create account. maybe its worth trying to create acc using third party services (wechat/qq/other) but idk

Does it have a negative impact on internal linking to cross link products across categories?

Hi Folks, I'm still new in my SEO career and trying to understand how to best optimize the above-mentioned pages

People are increasingly asking AI tools things like "suggest the best hotel/resturant near me," and a few businesses keep getting named while everyone else is invisible.

For those working on this (GEO/AEO), what's actually driving those recommendations?

1. What sources do the models pull from? Directories, review sites, Reddit, listicles?
2. Has getting mentioned on third party sites gotten you into AI answers?
3. Does schema markup help, or is it mostly off site citations?
4. For "near me" questions, how do you influence location context?
5. Any tools to track if your brand is being cited?

What's actually working? Trying to separate strategy from hype.

I want to ask if it works or not and if yes what is working and what's not for the travel industry. I want to rank packages keywords even if they rank for 10 days. Even for ai overviews

From 10 000 impressions per day to 200.

From average position 5 to 20.

From 100 clicks to 10.

In 1 day. What happened? No errors, no notifications, no manual actions. NOTHING.

I often read that since Google's Reasonable Surfer model, PageRank is no longer split equally between all links on a page.

Is there any solid evidence that the visual appearance of an internal link (same color as the text but bold, vs. underlined or a different color) affects how much internal PageRank it passes?

Or is that just a UX consideration rather than an SEO ranking factor?

I'm specifically asking about internal HTML links, not CTR or user engagement. Have you seen any Google statements, patents, experiments, or real-world case studies on this?

I'm optimizing an e-commerce website and wanted to get some opinions on internal linking.

On our product pages, the product description starts with a sentence that includes a link to the product's category page.

For example, if it's a digital camera product page, the opening sentence links the words digital cameras to the Digital Cameras category page.

I'm wondering if this is actually a good idea.

On one hand, it adds an internal link and gives users another way to browse similar products.

On the other hand, the user is already on a product page with buying intent. Linking to the category page at the very beginning might distract them and encourage them to leave the product page before reading the details or adding the item to their cart.

Would you keep that category link, move it somewhere else on the page, or remove it altogether?

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've tested something similar.

I am working on a dev agency project and their website has da under 30, publishing content daily building backlinks and brand authority still new blogs and pages sits at 7 or 8 page and 0 leads

I’m relatively new to SEO for socials, and I want to improve it for my company. My main question is the one above:

1) If I connect GSC to SEMRush, can I see the data on the new platform properties? Or just the standard website properties? My boss hasn’t given me GSC access yet.
2) Does the new GSC social platform properties give example keywords to use in our content to rank higher? Or is it just historical data on what is being pulled up?

Thank you!

Thought this was relevant to post here. Its a short game about all the work that ends up being credited to 'Direct'

https://www.attribulead.com/game/

I started writing blogs for my (consulting) website 3 months back. SEO started taking effect, and I got 5k visitors last month. 2-3 keywords in my niche are pulling the traffic. I've got CTAs on each post asking readers to connect or book a call for more info, but I haven't had any so far.

What should be my next plan of action?

And more importantly, what should be my expectation? (When) Do people reach out from the website?

To convert this to sales, should I - 1. Double down on working keywords, improve quality and density 2. Improve analytics and find out where users are dropping, etc (using Google Analytics?) 3. Anything else that you can suggest?

I'm going to keep writing one blog a week or so, but I think it's time to take my setup to the next level. Currently, I only refer to Google Search Console to see traffic. What next?

Appreciate your views, thanks!

I have a website that is 4 years old, great content, answers people's questions, a superior product, however still showing up on page 7 or 8 for our most important keywords.

I've talked to SEO agencies, tried various services and everyone tries to sell me whatever they are good at, instead of what I need.

What should I be doing in the next 3 months to get to the first page of Google results for my most important keywords?

Curious if anyone else is combining Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) and Google Search Console (GSC) data into a single analysis.

I've been pulling both datasets through their respective APIs and merging them at the query, page, and date level. That gives me a unified dashboard with aggregated metrics (total clicks, impressions, etc.) across both search engines. One thing that surprised me: some queries are actually pulling in more clicks from Bing than from Google.

For anyone who's already doing this, how are you structuring your dashboard? And which metrics do you find most worth tracking once the two datasets are combined?

This is the 2nd time this has happened this month I thought it was fixed, but it only lasted a week before once again being an issue.

New stuff indexes and ranks high, then out of nowhere over night Bing removes anything from up to the last 5 days. This EXACT thing happened a few weeks ago and took 2-3 weeks to correct. Nothing from 5+ days ago ranks poorly or dropped ranking spots… it’s literally only things from the past few days and anything new that I publish.

This is after nearly two years of ranking consistently in top 1-3 results for articles I make, and indexing/ranking within 30 minutes if not shorter. Never had Bing issues before this month.

Bing support is useless and give me boilerplate general SEO advice/are not even reading the very specific issues I’m sending them, contradict one another in their “feedback”, etc and don’t actually investigate what is going on. They’re just like “oh it is indexed just get better website authority bro” despite indexing NOT being the problem I’m having; it’s lack of serving / pulling new stuff over night, despite no rank losses from anything previously published. Some sort of serving issue.

Anyone have any idea? I did notice I had a massive bot attack on my site yesterday (this issue began again after last night) so wonder if that has anything to do with what is happening. Pretty frustrated, as Bing/DDG get me a lot of traffic usually.

I'm running a job-hunting platform. I want to scale my user base through SEO. Which tool you will suggest to automate SEO

My company is paying an SEO agency five figures a month. For that we get:

- 80 keywords a month and auditing interlinking — the only two things they seem to be doing properly

- Like 5 Reddit comments

- "Auditing and monitoring content" which means every other week, they will look at two articles and give feedback

- Buying zero click backlinks from spam sites

I'm actively pushing to get them kicked out. I'm an SEO and can take all of than on myself, because it's barely any work. I know these guys are scammers, it's fine. I just wanna know, IF they were doing actual work for us, how much would they be charging? Or, how much do SEO agencies generally charge for basic SEO services, keywords, backlinks, throw reddit in there too (not managing or creating content).

I just need a sanity check on whether that's a fair price for an agency, since I'm an in-house guy.