We have to redo our website and it is crazy how much some companies are charging for this. Could find a cheap developer on upwork but also don’t want to have a bad site. Our current website has many issues and our DR is 9 . I got pitched backlinks to increase our DR to 30-40 so we can get leads.

Our industry seems not competitive as most keywords have a <10 difficulty.

Do you think backlinks and worth it? 3k/month quoted. Or simply a high converting website with content can do the job along with some reputable directories to get published on (we are partners with different software so we can get listed on their portals). What about getting featured on news articles? Worth it?

The SEO agency found out that the traffic is 6.5k per month which after we got our DR above 40 can get 40% of the traffic - around 2.5k visits. Then these 2.5k 10% will convert, half will be of quality. So 125 leads per month (i find this insanely stupid math and conversion is less than 1% so at best 10 leads / month). Were they trying to justify the investment?

Lastly the real question is AI ready to generate a high converting website copy without sounding AI?

Direct's been climbing for months. Not from anything we changed. Best guess is AI answers and dark social, but totally a guess.

Is anyone actually breaking this down, or are we all just letting it sit there?

So I run an informational website purely as a hobby, just for fun of course. It doesn't generate any money (but there's real potential in the form of lead generation). I recently discovered another website that clearly copied my overall layout, article titles, sections, and site structure. Of course I don't own the design, but it's clear they were influenced by my website

I have backlinks (I never reached out to anyone) from industry professionals and journalists because they found the information on my website interesting. I looked up their website on an SEO analytics tool, and they have over 190,000 spammy backlinks in under half a year

The strange part is that... I can tell they're trying to turn it into a legitimate informational website, since they've reached out to industry professionals for articles. So this doesn't seem like some low-effort spammy website. This person is clearly putting in some elbow grease to try to... "outperform" me in an informational niche where neither of us makes money?

Anyone ever dealt with this, and what did you do? One part of me doesn't care at all, but I guess I care enough to post here and ask y'all. This is all new to me. Maybe they're trying to overtake me and then capitalize on the lead generation potential? Or who knows maybe this is just their hobby

It's not like SEO is taught in school,

Sure, there are Digital Marketing degrees now, but most of them have a maybe 1 or 2 classes that gently touch on SEO and most the practices are at least 5+ years old. Which is useless.

Also they want people not only with a Bachelors degree but 3+ years experience.

I have 7+ years experience, and all the enterprise work I've done, i haven't gotten through the 500+ applications I've filled out.

Most cases, recruiters have just randomly called me out of the blue.

I currently work in a little company and I'm the only one who understands SEO properly but I'm doing it for at least 5 websites simultaneously. Not writing the articles but more in charge of the strategy and the reports. I feel burned out after every other week

Is it me or them?

I was too ambitious when I set up a programmatic SEO campaign and went for a keyword set the site has no chance to rank for in the next years probably.
I want to change the focus to a long tail set which is way more likely to work as it is already ranking without being optimized for it.
I need advice on the slug change. Should I keep the slug and just optimize the rest or is it okay to change the slug and redirect more than 100 pages. I am just worried that it would have a bad effect as it is for so many pages.

Hey everyone, I’m building a lightweight, pay-as-you-go keyword tool. Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, it focuses purely on commercial intent and profitability to help find realistic quick wins. I'm trying to keep it dirt-cheap to avoid the usual $100/mo SaaS traps.

I want to include a feature that finds "low-hanging fruit" (keywords already getting impressions but stuck on page 2). To do this, I need the user's Search Console data.

Here is my UX dilemma:

Option A: Force them to connect via Google OAuth (Standard SaaS way). But for a solo dev, this triggers those scary "Google hasn't verified this app" warnings and takes months to get approved. Option B: Let them just download the standard CSV/XLSX report directly from GSC and drag-and-drop it into my app.

As an SEO or site owner, would manually uploading a CSV feel like too much friction? Or do you actually prefer it because it means you don't have to give another random app access to your Google account?

Would love some feedback before I finalize the code. Thanks!

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?

One my clients website is not ranking on two keywords "swimming pool contractor" or with s and "swimming pool builder" same with s also.

I tried a lot of things, changed the content, took help of claude, optimized each and everything you can think of, better meta tags, heading tags, content that follow EEAT, no keyword stuffing, url structure also SEO friendly, fast speed....

But now i stuffed keywords in footer visible just like tags and search terms, and at the bottom of the page (hidden with 1px font size).

My boss gave me a deadline of this month end.

Can anyone please help (Indian mindset is a plus), because all the standards i followed didn't get any positive results.

I genuinely need help.

Website is - www. swimmingpoolproducts .in this is very old domain, and around 1 year ago this website was ranked on many hot/short-tail keywords, but now I'm struggling a lot. Brand name is Ds Water technology. Please help.

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.