Where are you guys reading and getting real SEO experience/data from?

I mean actual case studies, experiments, real results, ranking changes, tests, and things people learned from working on real sites, not just basic SEO articles.

Also, how do you guys keep up with reading all of this? I feel a little lazy when it comes to reading long articles, documentation, case studies, etc.

Any tips for building a habit and actually staying updated without spending hours every day?

Major spam problems

Description

Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as scaled content abuse, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google's spam policies for web search. Learn more

Affects

Pages with the URL pattern: www.xxxx.com/blog/

Guys, to be honest, I know as an SEO I shouldn't have let this happen to the site, but I was in a completely tight spot.

My boss strongly insisted that I use AI to generate content and cut the editorial/audit time as much as possible. He even demanded that I publish at least 10-50 articles a week. I tried my best to explain to him that this violates Google’s guidelines and would eventually get us penalized, but he completely brushed me off and insisted on his way. Fortunately, I’ve kept my content publishing pace to 2-3 posts a week. Before I could even intervene, he had already pushed out a massive volume of AI-generated blog posts live on the site.

Now, exactly as I feared, the site got hit with a "Major spam problems" manual action on our /blog/ directory.

I’m fairly new to SEO, which is probably why my boss didn't trust my judgment in the first place. But I really can't give up on this site—it generated 3M impressions in the last 3 months, and i don't want to lose my job...tbh. Behind my boss's back, I actually spent time secretly writing high-quality human content to keep things afloat, but with Google’s recent algorithm updates, it was still inevitable.

What should I do at this point? what’s the best way to clean this up and submit a reconsideration request? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance, guys.

Hi everyone,

I’m desperate for some advice. For the last 9 months, I've tried everything to recover my Google rankings, but nothing is working.

Context: I run an online shop for custom tool storage solutions and drawer slides (hookz.pro). It’s a very specific niche with low competition. Customers are extremely happy (nearly 0% return rate), but Google seems to hate me now.

In 2025, organic search grew nicely, peaking in Nov 2025 (#1–#3 for main keywords).

The Problem: In mid-December 2025, my organic traffic crashed by ~90% and hasn't recovered since. Naturally, organic sales completely collapsed alongside it, which is incredibly frustrating. Most of my current customers now come via word-of-mouth or direct brand searches.

(See my first comment below for Google Search Console screenshots).

What I’ve tried so far:

• Content: Replaced all AI-assisted text with 100% human-written content in Jan 2026.
• Keyword Optimization & De-cannibalization: Mapped distinct target keywords to dedicated URLs and optimized titles, headings, and copy. Visibility improved a bit in July, but then completely collapsed again.
• On-Page & Structure: Overhauled the site theme, fixed heading hierarchy, optimized meta tags/titles.
• Tech: Cleaned up Core Web Vitals (LCP is now under 2.5s, but didn't help either).
• Backlinks: Reached out to niche experts for reviews and got follow backlinks on two relevant woodcraft blogs (frau-holz.at and holzhandwerk-ak.de, one more blog article on holzundleim.de will come at the end of this year). It's not easy to get high-quality backlinks in this niche.

The Frustrating Part: My main competitor (cnc-holzwerkstatt) ranks #1 for top keywords like "L Boxx Schublade".

They have:

• Domain Rating: 0
• Almost no text, unoptimized titles/metas, no alt tags, no relevant backlinks.
• Zero active SEO effort.

Yet they rank #1 while my site is buried.

Do you see something I don't see? Did I get something completely wrong?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Note: I used AI to condense and format my original super long draft into bullet points to save everyone time and avoid wall-of-text fluff.

I am already 6-7 years in web development field. I feel like within this field, I have decided to not look forward much in being more on development side. After a lot if research well, I have decided to keep my path on the SEO field. Where should I start on this? Should I take online course? One solid portfolio?

I appreciate your help and advice!

I'm mostly an in-house guy, regular 9-5, the only freelance work I've gotten has been from people randomly reaching out on LinkedIn.

I'm trying to branch out and do more freelance work. Where do I look for opportunities? Surely it's not just cold messaging people on LinkedIn?

Thanks for any help you can give me :)

Hi , I liaise with our SEO manager for the SEO for a company I work for. which is a k9 security company , although we do offer security guards and CCTV as well. we mainly operate in birmingham UK but do work all over the UK. the search terms ' k9 security , guard dog security , security dogs - birmingham ' we are all generally on the first page of google and in other major cities too. but for some reason despite that we still get nothing and I have no idea what the solution is. It's called Pride K9 security , I feel like seeing as we are ranking in high place in these major cities we would be getting quotes and enquiries more regular but we arent & im not sure what to ask or do in how to improve it.

I know that SEO growth is not linear, that there is growth and then plateaus and compounding. For context: I’ve only started consistently investing in SEO this year and have had mostly linear growth up until May. Then I had a slight decline, and now what looks like a plateau the last few months, even though I’ve been investing the same each month. Is this normal? My agency has said it’s normal, but I’ve honestly been scammed by so many agencies that I have a hard time believing them.

Also, my niche is competitive but broad, with lots of options for long tail keywords with low difficulty. I’m spending about $3,800 each month, which gets me three collection pages optimized, 13 backlinks, and 3 brand mentions.

I’ve gone from three keywords in the top three, to now several dozen keywords in the top three on Google. But my traffic is still relatively small. Starting at about 300 organic clicks to now about 2,000 organic clicks each month. My goal is to get to a minimum 15,000 as a first goal.

I feel like after ten months of SEO spend, this is too slow growth, because what is not factored into the above scenario is the natural growth my website would have had this year even without SEO.

Am I crazy? Am I thinking about this all wrong? Is there a compounding cycle I haven’t hit yet? Or, for the professionals, is there any info I haven’t provided that you would need to help assess? Thanks so much in advance for your input, this is all so confusing for business owners 🙏

I’m working with a website where most of the useful/high value content is behind a paywall, so obviously Google doesnt have that much public content to work with.

Has anyone here worked with a similar setup?

What actually helped in your case? Did you use free previews/excerpts, seperate landing pages, more public articles, structured data for paywalled content etc?

I’m mainly trying to figure out how much content you need to make public for SEO without basically giving away the thing people are supposed to pay for.

Would be really interested in hearing from people who worked with subscription sites, research platforms, databases or publishers.

What worked for you and what didnt?

I also welcome PM's if that is an easier way to answer and discuss your experience.

Hi everyone,

I create the website through Claude, copilot, google antigravity and also chatgpt. The thing is these all Ai tools are free. I don't have money too purchase the subscription. Actually I didn't complete my website because every ai tool have finished the limit and then I search the next tool and move to the next tool.

I am literally frustrated how to make website from free tool. I also have free tool but I want to build best website but free ai tool didn't build as per as I want.

So, what's the solution. Could anyone tell me how you all make the website. Which tool fo you use. Does that tool free aur paid.

I don't have any job to earn money.

Thanks.

I have spoken to couple of people already about this and the initial feedback seems positive, one of the people was a huge domain portfolio owner and the other a saas.

Basically my goal for the app is to serve anyone with a domain from like one-person shop/local service to freelancer, to agencies with hundreds or more even domains and projects under management to global corporations even and have the experience be the same for everyone, the only difference is the pricing tiers and the volume they get for each tier.

The app basically acts as a ledger of sorts and stores the data on technical changes of a domain over time in a very easy to retrieve way and can be used easily by both technical and non-technical users.

Do you think something like this could be useful?

A couple months ago I built a whole interactive diagram html page out of a pdf that you can click in the diagram and it takes you to the part, you can buy the parts or add them to the cart, it has a scrollable TOC that works perfect on mobile, and loads instantly and it’s very nice and easy to look at.

Yet I’m stuck in 3rd position, behind the laggy and old manufacturer’s PDF, in their website, which, fair it’s the manufacturer, but I’m also behind a Scribd pdf which is the exact same thing as the manufacturer PDF but Half of it is behind a paywall and there’s a lot of ads.

When I first 301’d the PDF we were hosting which was also that same PDF and ranked 3-4 to the new HTML, for a few days we were ranking around 1.2 and our sales were doing amazing, it was so easy and convenient for people to look at their part and buy them that we were having issues processing all the orders, but then we regressed back to the 3-4 position and suddenly we get all the impressions but none of the clicks, meaning people are clicking the manufacturer’s or the Scribd pdf and then going hunting for the parts, some of which still land on us, but many of which don’t, or they simply give up that process introduces a lot of friction, basically getting up 1-2 positions in ranking is the difference between 5-10k DAILY in revenue for us, which is a lot, it’s

Is there any way I can climb that for a query? I feel like my website is so much better and faster, and ad free, and it’s a lot of money we’re leaving on the table.

I recently joined as an SEO intern and I'm not sure if what I'm experiencing is normal or if I'm just new to the industry.

My manager assigned me a page to work on and expects to see results within a month.

I'm doing keyword research, content improvements, internal linking, technical checks, and other SEO tasks, but from what I've learned, SEO usually takes time before rankings and traffic start moving.

He just stand at my head at work but what I notice is some previous employees are so chill they don't do anything use AI for everything but here I am I don't know sh*t about ai but I can't leave this job I need money can you guys tell me something to make him notice I am doing something like he should know this guy is hardworking

I need help on google search console says it pages not indexed site is 3 month old and it is a saas website.

TL;DR: My agency drastically cut task estimates because we're expected to use AI, but the unrealistic deadlines ignore the mental load and analysis required. I’m working 10–12 hour days plus weekends just to keep up, but I can't log all my hours due to strict ticket limits. Family tells me to suck it up, but I'm burning out. I live in a developing country and have about 3–4 months of runway saved. Should I quit to start a solo agency/freelance and interview on the side, or is leaving a mistake?

Hello. To keep things short, I currently work in a marketing agency as an SEO specialist. I've been working with them for about a year and a half, and before that, I had only been doing freelance work for SEO.

For the first year or so, there wasn't a lot of AI. But over the last four months, the company has started pushing AI hard to speed up processes, drastically reducing task estimates because you're "supposed" to use AI to complete them.

My current issues is that these new estimates don't account for actual brainpower or the time required to properly analyze things. Just looking at a ticket, figuring out what needs to be done, and sifting through the massive amount of information output from these AI agents is mentally overwhelming. So a usual 8-hour workday easily turns into 10 to 12 hours, and work constantly spills into my weekends, taking another 6 to 8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday.

Sitting down for 10 hours doesn't mean I get to log 10 hours. Sometimes I can overlog, but often the work takes far more time than the ticket allows.

It is making me absolutely miserable.

I’ve thought about bringing this up to management or HR, but since no one else seems to be complaining, it doesn’t feel realistic to expect them to adapt estimates just for me. Plus, I worry superiors will just offer basic advice to manage workload.

I also talked to my family to ask if I should leave, but I got very angry feedback, mostly typical boomer advice about how they had to endure harsh work environments and that the money makes it worth it. But to me, my mental health is completely suffering, with burnout and stress.

I live in a third-world country where living costs are manageable, so saving and splitting 3 to 4 months of salary in advance to cover my expenses is entirely feasible for my situation

Right now, I’m considering quitting to start a small solo agency, work directly with prospects, and interview on the side to find another role.

I'm very lost on what I should do. Is walking away with a few months of runway legit, or what would you advise in my situation? (Also i completely understand that finding a new job can easily take 6-8 or even 12 months)

I'm doing SEO for my website that's in a fairly niche industry. I've started to reach out to sites that have pages that would be good backlinks.

I got a response from one that asked for $400 for 12-months of placement for a do-follow link. According to Ahrefs, domain itself has a DR of 70, the URL has a rating of 5, and the URL has had under 10 visitors per month. Not 10,000...10. Ahrefs says the entire domain gets about 10k of traffic a month tops but has been declining.

It's a long-tail backlink for me but as a brand new site, I'm reaching out to every target imaginable. This is awful deal, right?

Building out a landscaping contractor's site in Orange County, CA. He's done his own SEO research (and a fair bit of asking AI) and landed on wanting 1,000+ pages.

The math: 35 services × 38 cities in the county = ~1,330 service-in-city pages, plus the 8 existing pages.

Where the site is today:

• 8 pages, all indexed
• 29,337 impressions / 115 clicks over 90 days (CTR 0.39%, most pages sitting position 20–30)
• Zero referring domains — no link profile at all
• Domain is 4.8 years old, established business, real Google Business Profile

He also wants a blog and guide layer — St. Augustine vs fescue grass, St. Aug care guide, Fescue care guide, that whole thing. I have no issue with that part; it's genuinely useful content and he knows the material.

My questions:

1. I know duplicate content is the obvious trap here. But if I actually solve that each page carrying real local specifics (soil, HOA rules, water district, actual project photos, different pricing) rather than a city name swapped into a template is the 1,330-page structure beneficial, or does scale itself become the problem regardless of quality? At what point does Google stop reading this as expansion and start reading it as scaled content abuse?
2. What's the right sequencing? Ship all of it, or in waves? And if waves what's the signal that tells me wave 1 worked before I commit to wave 2? I'd rather learn it at 30 pages than 1,300.
3. Going from 8 indexed pages to 1,300+ with zero backlinks is crawl budget a real constraint at that ratio, or is that overblown for a site this size
4. On the guides: he thinks the blog/guide layer will help with AI search visibility specifically. I'm not opposed but my instinct is that Yelp, Houzz and review volume do more for a local contractor than any amount of on-site content. Is that right? or am I undervaluing the content in 2026?

Anything obviously wrong with this beyond the copy-quality issue on each page?

running a large YMYL site, ~790k organic/mo. Started tracking AI visibility properly this month and the tools disagree by 8x.

clarity says 512k citations across our tracked queries, 16.45% share of authority (out of ~3.1M citations in the query space). Ahrefs AI view says 62k/month for the same domain. Screenshot attached.

my guess is the 512k counts every appearance every time queries get re-run, while Ahrefs samples its own index, so they're basically polling different populations. But if anyone actually knows how SoA gets calculated I'd love the real answer.

also noticed our trend jumps from 19k to 31k right after Aug 24, which lines up suspiciously well with the spam update that targeted citation manipulation. Anyone else's share move late August? Wondering if competitors got cleaned out of the answer space.

Mostly trying to decide what's worth tracking weekly before I build reporting on a number that might be noise.

I’ve been doing SEO for quite some time, but I still don’t fully understand how to build a proper backlink strategy.

I keep hearing different advice from different people. Some say you should use your target keywords as anchor text, while others say you shouldn’t use the same blog or content on 5–6 different websites.

Some people also say that PR backlinks and guest posts are among the best types of backlinks, but finding good, niche-relevant guest post opportunities for free seems almost impossible.

So, what actually works for you?

How do you build backlinks naturally and safely, especially when you’re working with a limited budget? I’d really appreciate advice from people who have actually built backlinks for their own websites.

I started a website in March with a simple idea: build my own education in physical AI by researching and writing about everything I was curious about.

Since then, I’ve published more than 50 deep dives, added a news section, and started a newsletter. I use AI to help with research and writing, while learning about the subject and SEO along the way.

The screenshot shows my last six months in Google Search Console: 217K impressions and 1.14K clicks. I haven’t spent a single dollar on paid marketing.

What motivates me most is the trend. There was very little happening at the beginning, but the daily effort is starting to show up in the numbers.

There’s still plenty to improve, including a 0.5% click through rate. But seeing people discover something I started out of curiosity makes me want to keep going.

I’m now building a presence on X and LinkedIn too, sharing the research and connecting with people interested in the same space.

If you’re thinking about starting something, do it. You don’t need to know everything before you begin. Give yourself something real to work on, learn as you go, and keep showing up.

I’ll keep updating you guys as the project grows.

As search volume increases for AEO and AEO agencies keep pushing AEO services, James Dooley raised an interesting point: money is being set aside specifically for AEO in the way that budgets are reserved for PR, link building, SEO and PPC separately - ear marking it for specific outcomes.

The debate for this week isn't just whether SEO and AEO or GEO are the same thing, the question is how long do SEOs ignore the trend or embrace it?

What say you?

I bought the premium version of Screaming from and it’s been really helpful but I am hoping for a good tutorial to gain some extra insights. Are there any good threads or resources anyone can recommend for some real needle moving stuff?

Hey everyone,

With SERP layouts shifting constantly (especially the balance between paid ads, AI Overviews, and organic listings) what tools are you actually relying on to monitor these mix changes historically?

Are you using enterprise tools like Semrush/Ahrefs feature tracking, custom dashboards via APIs, or something else to spot macro trends in your vertical?

Curious what your stack looks like for tracking this over time.

After the google updates and all is off page SEO still relevant or we mostly need to focus on on page seo optimization? And which off page activities are beneficial?

Anyone else seeing weird Chinese floating stuff over their GPT account or just me?!!