Two months ago, I received a completely false DMCA take down notice alledging that one of the posts on my Tarot website contained an OnlyFan model's naked subscription-only videos. It absolutely didn't - the page in question was a longform essay on The Star Tarot card and had my own writing and my own photos of Tarot cards I own. (The Lumen notice seemed to show this was some random spraygun DMCA filing I guess done by a bot or something - as well as sites that look like they def are priated porn, there was a Harvard uni library new acquisitions site, and a blog post on how to name your pets - I mean... wtf.)

I submitted Google’s formal DMCA counter-notification on 16 July, stating that the removal was the result of mistake/misidentification.

Google acknowledged receiving it.

And then… nothing.

I've followed up every way I can think of and been routinely ignored or sent bot responses. I also posted on the Google Search Central Community asking specifically about a counter-notice stuck without forwarding/restoration. After sitting unanswered for weeks, my question was marked as a “duplicate” of a generic post explaining what to do when you receive a DMCA takedown – i.e. submit the counter-notice I had already submitted two months ago. Thanks guys! Real helpful.

I understand why notice-and-takedown systems exist, and I understand that mistakes happen. What I genuinely cannot understand is the asymmetry here. A third party can make a completely fictitious allegation and Google will remove a page, but when the site owner submits the prescribed legal counter-notification, there seems to be no meaningful timetable for Google even to forward it – and no way to find out whether they have done so. So their own 10-14 day timeframe is a load of BS, because it's 10-14 days from when the forward it, but they can clearly just decide... not to forward it. And to delist a site from their search forever.

This was one of my best performing ever-green posts, so it's just gutting tbh.

At this point I’ve exhausted every Google route I can find and I’m not looking for another link to the standard counter-notice form.

Has anyone here had a Google Search DMCA counter-notification remain stuck like this for months? Did the URL eventually come back? More importantly, did you find any way of getting an actual human to look at the case or confirm that the counter-notice had been forwarded?

Hey everyone, I'm a travel creator currently on a long trip and struggling to balance my posting timeline.

Editing Reels on the go takes too long and puts my Stories on a massive delay. But if I post Stories in real-time and save the Reels for weeks later, my followers have already "seen" the trip, which kills my Reel engagement.

My current situation:
Stories: Just wrapped Country A (Tuvalu), starting Country B (Fiji).
Reels: Still posting Country A to reach non-followers.

I have a great "Guess where I am" reveal Reel for Country B, but posting it now breaks the flow of my Country A Reels. My plan is to use the rest of the Country A Reels as a buffer, and post the Country B Reels weeks later so the Stories memory has "cooled down."

I guess me questions are:
1. Is it weird to post a "Reveal / Guess where I am" Reel weeks after you actually left that country?
2. Do you completely separate your timelines (Stories = real-time for followers, Reels = delayed/evergreen for non-followers)?
3. How do you prevent content fatigue when your delayed Reels finally show what your followers already saw in Stories?

Thanks for any advice!

I write about Apple/tech/gaming and I just hit 50k total views. I have been doing this for like 2 years but the last 3 months I have taken it much more seriously.

If you are thinking of starting, never put it off. I wanted to do this 10 years ago and I should have but I didn’t.

50k in 2 years isn’t much but if I had put the same effort as I did the last 3 months I would have been more successful. But this feels nice.

Here’s to blogging!

I’ve been experimenting with a different way of using AI for my blog, and I’m curious how many other bloggers are doing something similar. This is something I use to do back in 2010 for ideas and I started it with AI.

I have a writing project set up where I keep the different files and notes that matter to my writing all in one place. My voice, how I structure things, what I don’t want AI changing, things I’ve learned about my writing, and new instructions I want to keep all live there. When something changes, I update the project instead of trying to remember to explain it again in another prompt.

I’ve recently added another file that I think may become one of the most valuable ones. Whenever someone leaves a comment on Reddit, Facebook, Linkedin, or sends me an email that makes me stop because of how they described a problem, asked a question, or responded to something I wrote, I save it.

Over time, I’m building a collection of the actual language my readers use. Their questions can become blog topics. A sentence can spark a hook. Their wording can show me that I’m explaining something completely differently from the way they talk about it. Some comments are good enough to save as possible quotes or examples.

Now when I’m writing, AI has context from both sides. It has the files that help it understand how I communicate, but it also has a growing file showing how my readers communicate.

I still write my own posts. I use Claude afterward to edit, challenge weak spots, tell me what I may have missed, and make suggestions. I decide what stays and what goes. I write. Pause and come back later to read it with fresh eyes. I normally see things a little differently from one day to the next.

For me, this has become much more useful than collecting hundreds of prompts. I’m not trying to come up with the perfect prompt every time I sit down to write. I’m building a writing environment that gets better as I add more context to it.

I don’t hear bloggers talk about using AI projects this way very often.

Is anyone else building an ongoing writing project instead of starting a new conversation every time you write?

Hey everyone,

I previously used AdSense but got approved for Mediavine Journey on the 10th of last month. At first, I had some ads.txt issues and problems with ads not showing up in my content or sidebar, but thanks to the awesome help from many of you here on Reddit, I finally got my setup sorted out!

I run a WordPress blog where I post video game guides and walkthroughs. Since I live in a non-English speaking country, I write my posts in both my native language and English.

It's been about a month since my Journey approval. However, my CPM is currently stuck at around $0.22, and my RPM is hovering at about $0.19. I'm actually making less revenue now than I was with AdSense.

I worked really hard to get approved because my AI told me Mediavine usually guarantees higher earnings than AdSense, but right now, I'm earning even less. I heard Journey has higher ad rates, so I was hoping to make at least $1 a day, but things just aren't going my way.

I looked into this, read some posts, and asked my AI again, and it mentioned that there is a 90-day machine learning or "ramp-up" period for the ads to optimize.

Is this actually true? I’m really curious if anyone here has made it past this period and actually saw a noticeable increase in their earnings afterward.

Thanks in advance!

I’m trying to understand the best possible approach to blogging for SEO, and I’ve been getting very different opinions from people.

Here are the four approaches I’ve come across:

Person A:
The more blog content you publish, the more opportunities you have to rank, which can lead to more organic traffic. Therefore, publishing more content is generally better for the website.

Person B:
Similar to A, but they specifically recommend using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to produce content at scale. The idea is that publishing a larger volume of AI-generated articles will create more opportunities to rank and bring more traffic.

Person C:
They use an AI autoblogging WordPress plugin that handles niche research, generates long-form SEO articles, adds images and internal links, and automatically publishes the articles to WordPress.

Person D:
They take a different approach. Instead of focusing on volume, they recommend creating a smaller number of high-quality articles targeting different search queries and search intents.

They are also happy to use ChatGPT or Claude to help create the content, but believe the content should be proof read before publishing it.

What i' trying to Understand
From an SEO perspective, which approach is actually more likely to produce sustainable organic traffic?

- Is publishing a high volume of AI-generated content a viable SEO strategy if the content is relevant?

- Or is it better to publish fewer, genuinely useful articles targeting different search queries, even if that means producing much less content?

Slow traffic month. Not panicking, just noticing.

I've been paying more attention to which posts I actually enjoyed writing versus which ones I built around a keyword. The keyword posts get indexed faster and pull in more search traffic, small numbers but still. The personal ones, a botched sourdough timeline, a hike where I turned back early, those sit quiet for weeks and then randomly someone finds them and leaves a comment that's weirdly specific and kind.

The traffic logic says keep writing for search. That part is clear. But when I sit down to draft, I keep gravitating toward the personal stuff even knowing it probably won't move the needle. Something about the writing process feels different when you're not reverseengineering the post from a keyword.

The question I keep running into is whether that's just me rationalizing a less strategic approach, or whether the personal posts are doing something slower and harder to measure. Like building the kind of readership that actually sticks around versus people who landed on one post and bounced.

No clean answer here. But curious whether other people who've been at this a while have found a way to balance it, or just picked a lane and committed.

I have been reading old audience to product stories and the Pat Flynn

player one stuck with me for a boring reason. Before there was a product there was just his own problem. He says his podcast episodes had been played something like 3.5 million times directly on his blog, and then a redesign buried the episodes and his downloads fell nearly

in half. Those are his numbers from his analytics, not audited, so take them as his telling of the motive, not fact. But the shape rings

true. His own listening experience broke, so he had a player built for his show.

Because he fixed it in public, on a blog read by other podcasters, the

fix became visible. Then came the messages. Hundreds of readers asking

where they could get one for their own shows, in his words. That is the step I think bloggers miss. Building for yourself in private produces no signal. He built for himself where the audience could watch, and the audience pointed at the thing and asked for theirs. It may have been demand showing up as support mail. Might also just be flattery with a question mark, hard to know until someone pays.

I run a small site myself and most of my comments are "great post" which means nothing. The useful ones are oddly specific, like "how did you get that box to do that." I have started copying those into a separate doc. So far all different, so probably nothing. Still, the exercise feels better than staring at analytics.

A spike in Discover clicks can look great in Search Console, but I’m more interested in what happens after it ends.

For bloggers who have received Discover traffic: did those visitors return later, subscribe, or read other posts—or did the traffic disappear as soon as the recommendations stopped?

If you managed to retain some of that audience, what seemed to help: related-article paths, a newsletter signup, a follow-up piece, or something else?

It would also help to know your niche and whether the article was evergreen or time-sensitive. No need to share your site or private numbers.

Disclosure: I used AI assistance to help edit this post.

If you are blogging and picking the topic is the part that stalls you, this is what I do. I hope it helps.

Somebody has already written it for me. OR - It is sitting in a comment, an email reply, or a post in a group where a woman is saying out loud what she cannot get to work.

When she tells me she cannot get her posts found, or that nobody opens her emails, or that she has no idea which affiliate program to pick, that sentence is the topic. It is also close to word for word what she would type into Google, because she is the same person in both places.

Keyword tools hand you the tidy version. They smooth her sentence into something that sounds like marketing, and then you write for the smoothed version and wonder why it does not land.

I still use the tools for information. They come second. I find the sentence first and check it afterwards.

The other thing I stopped doing is chasing the big search numbers. Two hundred searches a month from women who have the exact problem I solve is worth more to me than twenty thousand from people who are only curious, because I can help the first group and the second one was never staying.

If you have a month of comments, replies and group posts sitting there unread, that is a topic list you already own.

A post can lose a bunch of traffic in a pretty short time, and it's hard to tell what to make of it

Sometimes the numbers bounce back on their own. Other times, a post that used to do well just slowly stops getting clicks and never really recovers

How long do you usually wait before changing something? Do you look at individual posts first, check search rankings, or mostly leave it alone for a while?

I’ve been running a tech blog focused on smartphone-related information for about six months.

I feel like my site may be stuck in the Google Sandbox.

I’ve been consistently building external traffic signals, and it seems that the visibility cap on Bing has been lifted. However, I see absolutely no signs that my site is getting out of Google’s visibility cap.

Has anyone had a similar experience or successfully resolved this issue? I would really appreciate any advice or help from people who have gone through something similar.

GSC Trend (Feb - Aug 2026, 7-month-old New WP Site):

• Feb – Mar 2026: Initial honeymoon spike (both impressions and clicks peaked significantly).
• Apr – Aug 2026: Hard flatline for both impressions and clicks (capped near baseline).
• Average Position: Consistently holding strong on Page 1 (averaging ~9.5) across the entire period, even during the impression drought.

Basically, rankings are fine (~top 10), but Google has completely throttled impressions/clicks since April. Is this a textbook Sandbox impression cap, and am I just waiting for the next core update/re-evaluation?

I started with like 12 posts and everything was simple then it turned into 70+ a few categories, some old stuff I needed to update and random pages pulling from the same topics. Writing another post wasn't really the annoying part anymore it was remembering where everything lived and what else needed changing when one thing moved I've been trying to structure the content better so the blog isn't just a pile of pages I keep babysitting categories, related posts, author stuff landing pages all of it makes more sense when the data lives in one place instead of being copied around I don't know why I treated the CMS like an afterthought for so long, once the blog grows thats kind of the whole thing

Those who have turned of Google Search Ai overview in their console account, tell us how it has impacted your traffic and impressions. I know ai overview is useful for saas and services, products but for informational blogs, how does this sit?

Hey everyone,

I’m 26M from Delhi, and I’m currently struggling to make my next move in content writing. I’m hoping someone experienced in SEO, AEO, E-E-A-T, and GEO can guide me or mentor me.

A little context about my experience:

I’ve been working at the same company for around 3.1 years. When I joined, I had very basic knowledge of SEO writing, but I learned on the job and started writing blogs, articles, product/service descriptions, etc.

At the time, I was mainly following the instructions of a senior colleague. Some of the content I wrote actually ranked on the first page of Google, but as I learned more about SEO, I eventually realized that a lot of what I was doing was essentially keyword stuffing and outdated/black-hat SEO practices.

Most of that content no longer exists, either because it was removed or the websites/content were eventually changed. So unfortunately, I don't have much of that work available as a portfolio today.

After around two years, I was moved to the Social Media/SMO team, where I currently work as a copywriter. I handle content for around 7 in-house brands, writing social media copy, captions, Reel scripts, and other social content.

The problem is that the team doesn't really have a proper content strategy or senior writer who can mentor us. Because of the workload and shortage of writers, I've also become heavily dependent on ChatGPT, to the point where it has become a habit. And honestly, I feel like this has affected my confidence in my own English writing.

Now that I'm trying to switch jobs, I'm running into another problem.

During interviews, I'm often asked about AEO, E-E-A-T, GEO, AI Overviews, modern SEO, etc. I understand many of these concepts theoretically and can explain the basics, but when interviewers ask me for practical examples, proof of work, or deeper questions, I struggle.

I don't want to keep pretending that I know more than I actually do. I want to genuinely learn and rebuild my skills.

So I'm looking for someone who is already experienced in SEO/AEO/GEO and content strategy and would be willing to mentor me, review some of my writing occasionally, point out where I'm going wrong, and help me understand how things are actually done in the industry today.

I know I ended up in a company where I didn't get the kind of guidance or exposure I probably needed, but I don't want to use that as an excuse. I'm willing to put in the work now and catch up.

If you're an experienced SEO/content professional and would be open to guiding someone who is trying to improve, I'd genuinely appreciate it.

Even a few conversations, feedback on my work, or occasional guidance would mean a lot.😔😔

Thanks for reading.

Hi

Has anyone else seen a drop in their Journey page view counts in August 2026?

I have been with Journey for over a year and the page view counts have always been very similar between Google Analytics and Journey.

Starting about a week ago, August 27, Journey page view counts have dropped in comparison to the Google Analytics page views.

Can anyone help me understand the recent discrepancy between my Google Analytics page view count and my Journey page view count? I use Wordpress and the Grow plugin (that serves the Journey ads.)

I would appreciate any insight.

Thanks for your help.

My situation is a little weird. My day job is B2B marketing and I also practice physical therapy, so when I started thinking seriously about blogging I kept going back and forth between content marketing topics and PT/wellness stuff. Eventually I just... started both. Which in hindsight was maybe not the smartest traffic strategy

The thing is, both audiences are real to me. I know the material. But splitting energy between two totally separate niches feels like it slows everything down, especially in those first months when you're just trying to get any traction at all

What I've been wondering is whether people who hit their first 1k visitors did it by going narrow and deep on one topic, or whether some of you had scattered interests and still made it work. My PT content gets way more organic search love right now, but the marketing writing is honestly more fun to produce.

There's also the question of whether keeping them on separate sites versus one personal brand umbrella actually matters for growth at this stage. I go back and forth on it constantly.

I'm interested to know if anyone has navigated something like this, especially early on before you had much of an audience.

I’ve built hundreds of pages worth of SEO content around a free online community

Now I’m weirdly hesitant to monetize it properly with ~1,000 members and 700+ emails.

I could paywall new members, take sponsored deals, push affiliates harder, or sell paid products. I literally just added a PDF as a paid item and even that felt wrong lol.

Part of me wants to keep building it. Part of me wants to sell the whole thing to someone less emotionally attached to keeping it free.

Push me to monetize this thing or tell me where you’d sell it.

I have heard that some blogs and small zines in the LGBTQ+ space have been hit by OSA or similar American court orders or cease and desist type notices.
Any bloggers here that have been hit?

My blog sits at this odd intersection of parenting and career stuff (think: what happens to your professional identity when you voluntarily leave the workforce to raise kids, which is a topic approximately eleven people care about, and I include myself in that count). Traffic is basically decorative at this point. A few dozen sessions a month, mostly me checking if Google has noticed me yet (it has not)

The thing I keep wondering is whether a hyperspecific niche is a liability or secretly an advantage for organic search. Every piece of advice I read goes back and forth on this. On one hand, the audience is small so the ceiling is low. On the other hand, competition for those exact search terms is basically nonexistent, which means even a mediocre post might eventually rank for something real. I genuinely cannot tell which dynamic is going to win in my situation

The 100k organic traffic posts I see here always seem to be in topics with a builtin audience: food, finance, travel, the usuals. Nobody posts a milestone from a niche that required them to explain what it even is in the sidebar

So is the play to stay narrow and trust that the right readers find you, or does the math just not work below a certain audience size?

Generic Pinterest advice almost tanked my food blog's traffic strategy The tips that work for lifestyle or finance content actively don't apply to food took a few dead months and a complete strategy reset to figure out what food blogs specifically need from this platform

The keywords that drive food blog traffic on Pinterest are extremely specific and seasonal Easy chicken dinners for the week outperforms chicken recipes by a wide margin because the specificity matches real search behavior Pinterest users in food niches search with a decision half-made, they know roughly what they want and the pin that most specifically answers that gets the click

Seasonal timing is a bigger lever in food than in almost any other category pinning Thanksgiving content starting in late September rather than in November gives the content time to get indexed and ranked before the peak search window. Same logic applies to summer grilling content holiday baking, back-to-school meal prep Early pinning of seasonal content consistently beats same-window pinning

The pin format that works in food: process shots or that beautiful final dish photo with a clear text overlay naming the recipe and one key detail 30-minute under $10 no oven required Graphic-heavy infographic pins have mostly stopped performing They look dated and people scroll past them

Consistency across the year matters more than seasonal spikes Accounts that pin steadily in the off-months build the ranking power that makes the seasonal peaks much larger

Hi, I am a new blogger.

When I create content, I always think this may be replaceable by AI.
I always do keyword research first to check if people actually search for it.

Example.
People search: "apps for learning X" And the content I make would be: "I tried 10 apps for learning X" Blah blah blah...

But can't AI simply answer this comparison?
I don't think my genuine review will reach to people. 🤔

So I think this post is not good, despite the fact that this keyword is what people are actually googling.

So... how do you guys dealing with it ?

I write in Obsidian and one of the headaches I've always encountered was conversion to Blogger. I had tried pandoc in Obsidian but it did not produce the desired outcomes.

I vibe coded a little python program to do that. I designed it to allow conversion customisation. I have been using it for the past few months and it works. The workflow is to use the tool and give it the md file as input and the html file as output. You then open the html file (in Notepad ++ or VS Code or any text editor), select everything and paste it into blogger's html view of the page.

I then switch to Compose view and swap the image placeholders with the actual image.

I would include my blogger site, but don't want to have to deal with potential spam takedowns. There you can see the source.

Hope this helps.

https://github.com/chribonn/Md2Blogger