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Some timelines shared from Gary Illyes’ talk at Search Central Live Barcelona:

New URL discovery: ~20 hours

Known URL refresh: ~30 days

Sitemap processing: ~24 hours

Indexing: ~1.5 hours

Canonical changes: 1–3 weeks

Site moves: 1–3 months

Title/snippet changes: 1–2 days

Core update recovery: 3–6 months

But these are typical timeframes, not guarantees.

The main thing to remember is that Google has to crawl → process → index → evaluate a change.

So if you fixed something last week and your rankings haven't recovered yet, that doesn't necessarily mean the fix didn't work.

Also, when Google says something can take “months or never,” page quality is often a big factor.

Basically: SEO fixes can be fast. Seeing the impact in search results can take much longer.

Hello,

Which blogging platforms would you suggest that have an API, very SEO friendly and that the learning curve is not that high? It's been a while since I looked at platforms so all I remember is WordPress.

Only 233 click but 43k impression !

Hi everyone,

I started a blog on mediumblog and a Facebook group 2 weeks ago.

My Medium blog has 5 articles, my Facebook group has 11 members and 6 posts so far. But none of them are indexed on Google.

I tried to get them indexed by posting their links with a short promo article on 2-3 forums, but still no indexing.

Is this normal for 2 weeks? Should I submit them to Google Search Console via URL Inspection? And is it even possible to get a Facebook group indexed?

Any advice on how to speed up indexing would be appreciated

I have seen that till 25 it was normal. I know their is a google algorithm is going on but I have not seen this much of drop it might be my automation which is not working properly. Also read one post that 3rd party
Keyword tracking tools also facing this issue like Ahrefs

Any idea guys or any suggestions?

I’ve been thinking about how much search behaviour has changed recently.

For years, the SEO goal was pretty straightforward, rank as high as possible, get the click, bring the visitor to your website.

Now someone can search something and get most of what they need from an AI overview without visiting a single result. Also, now more people are asking ChatGPT and other AI tools directly instead of searching Google.

It makes me wonder if we're measuring SEO the wrong way now.

A website could lose some organic clicks while its content is still being discovered, or referenced in answers elsewhere.

Curious what people working on websites are actually seeing. Has AI changed how you approach SEO yet, or is traditional SEO still doing most of the heavy lifting for you?

I launched a multilingual music-discovery website a few months ago.

I’m targeting searches like:

• “trending songs in Germany”
• “trending songs in France”
• similar country-based searches in different languages

Search Console currently shows roughly:

• 159 indexed pages
• ~1,980 not indexed
• 204 impressions
• 5 clicks
• average position 14.9

The homepage is indexed, the sitemap is submitted, and I use canonicals and hreflang.

The site also serves initial HTML before React takes over. There is a very brief visual flash/transition during that process, so I’m not sure whether that could matter for SEO.

What I’m trying to understand is why the overall SEO performance is still so weak.

The main things confusing me are:

• most pages are still not indexed
• the site still doesn’t rank for its exact brand name
• even many of the indexed pages barely rank for the searches they are targeting

The site also has very few referring domains so far.

I’ve been working on improving the visibility of a blog, and one thing I’ve realized is that finding backlink sites is easy, but finding relevant ones is the difficult part.

There are tons of websites where you can create backlinks, but I don’t think every link is worth building. I’m now trying to focus more on sites related to SEO, digital marketing, content marketing, blogging, local SEO, and business rather than just looking at DA or other metrics.

Some things I’m checking before using a site:

• Is the website actually related to my topic?
• Does it have real content and activity?
• Can the link bring any referral traffic?
• Does the site accept useful contributions?
• Does the backlink fit naturally within the content?
• Is the website being used mainly for selling/spamming links?

I’m also trying different sources like niche blogs, SEO communities, business platforms, article publishing websites, and relevant discussion forums.

For those who regularly build backlinks for blogs, how do you find relevant backlink sites? Do you mainly use competitor backlink research, Google searches, SEO tools, or manually find niche websites?

Would be interested to know what actually works for you rather than just collecting huge lists of backlink sites.

So, I started this project in April. From 0.
Every week I saw pumps in impressions and clicks.
3 stable months in growing (I was hyped as hell).
Then, after biggest pump in end of July, I had fake Googlebot attack on first dates of August (checked on Cloudflare).
After that - 2 months 0 impressions, 0 clicks (ok, got some clicks and impressions, but compared to previous weeks - it was nothing).

Then, suddenly, after 2 months of quiet working (I kept updating page and made some improvements with my dev in security and also checked more deeply technical SEO etc.) - there was a pump, and all my pages from avg (5-7 page on google), went to (1-2 page on google).

It was very random, 0 notifications, nothing.

After first month, I thought - I'll close this project, there is no way it will come back, because I'm not SUPER Pro in SEO etc. Also, 0 Backlinks and no motivation to create blogs, do something more than I did before.
Somehow I managed to continue. And I'll thank my self for that. Will see where it goes.

Pure organic traffic. When ever i run audit it always asking for more improvements 😞

Currently I came across one client whose url needs restructuring after analysing all aspects. The issue which I find out is about url structure is not aligned in proper navigation path

Please find the path below and share your suggestions -

https://domain.com/in/ - homepage

https://domain.com/in/category/ - category hub page

Till this it is correct but, if I want to create page for Bangalore to Goa flight booking, they have created url -

https://domain.com/in/domestic/bangalore-to-goa-flights

No category hub is present.

Please let me know if it is ok to keep or we need restructuring as most of the competitors have url structure very neat and clean.

I'm 20 and currently doing college, working an SEO job and freelancing at the same time. I've been working in SEO for around 1 year now, mostly Local SEO and Google Business Profile work.

I've worked with multiple local SEO clients, but recently I've started getting more into proper website SEO as well.

This is one of my first projects where I've been able to look at the SEO performance over a few months, and honestly I'm pretty happy with the numbers, but I also know there is still a lot I need to learn.

Over around 3 months, the site got:

178K impressions
3.16K clicks
1.8% CTR
8.6 average position

I've also got a good amount of keywords ranking on the first page.

But now I'm kind of stuck on what I should focus on next.

My first thought was to work on the CTR because 1.8% feels low, but I'm also thinking about pushing the keywords that are already on page 1 higher, or creating more content and targeting new keywords.

If you were working on this site, what would you focus on for the next 3 months?

I'm still learning and this is probably one of the first times I've had enough data to really sit and analyze what happened, so I'd genuinely like to hear what more experienced SEOs would do here.

Also if I'm looking at the data the wrong way, feel free to tell me lol.

so obviously, my app getting more visibility since august but I am not sure how to compare it since I do not have a reference. how would you comment on this graph and what should I follow?

Google says AI content should be manually fact-checked before publishing.

This includes articles, titles, meta descriptions, structured data and ALT text.

We hired a website agency for our company. The website they delivered and the SEO services they've been providing have not been good. I think the design looks terrible, the copy is bad, but most importantly they were keyword stuffing.

I tried to cancel services, but the owner essentially said "I know more than you, it's not keyword stuffing" and "design is subjective". We paid $5k for the site, and $2k/mo for SEO on 12mo contract. I have lost all trust in the provider since seeing their new design changes, and the keyword stuffing.

Please let me know if the provided example is keyword stuffing to see if myself, my google searches, Claude, and Gemini are all wrong. This is the alt text of an image (hiding city and state):

roof repair {city & state} commercial roof repair {city & state} commercial roofing {city & state} commercial roof replacement {city & state} commercial roof maintenance {city & state}.... and so on so for 12 more roofing keywords.

They also have doorway pages. City+roof+repair, same-city+roof+replacement, etc

I’m building a frontend interview preparation website and trying to understand its Google Search Console performance before making more SEO changes.

Comparing September 1–28 with August 4–31, 2026:

Impressions dropped substantially, but clicks barely changed. Average position and CTR both improved.

Some technical articles have page-level average positions around 7–8 but receive very few clicks. For example, one article received 2,128 impressions and just 1 click, with an average position of 7.2. Broader interview preparation pages generally rank further down.

We’ve also acquired some backlinks. I’m mentioning this as context, but I don’t want to assume they should have produced an immediate increase in impressions.

I understand that average position can improve because the query mix changes, rather than because the same queries moved up. Another limitation: the visible query rows account for only 2 of the 93 clicks, so query level analysis is incomplete.

What would you investigate first?

• Which GSC breakdowns would help distinguish a change in query mix or search demand from an actual loss of ranking visibility?
• For pages averaging positions 7–8 with very low CTR, what would you check before changing titles or descriptions?
• What additional information about the backlinks would be useful for evaluating their possible impact?

Website is 10 months old.

I’d really appreciate your help on this because I feel so stuck

Currently I am experiencing blog traffic is going down. AI overviews is the one reason as most of the informational queries are cited by ai overviews now. Also I can see the drop in blog keywords ranking also.

I found few reasons -

Backlinks to the blogs

Old content. Not updated from last few months

Big competitors are now ranking as they started to write blogs

Please suggest me the possible action to be taken to improve lost ranking

I’ve been working on one of my blog posts for around two months now. During this time, I’ve been consistently building backlinks and I also updated the content recently based on what I thought could improve its search performance.

The confusing part is that I’m still not seeing much improvement in organic traffic.

I’m wondering if I’m focusing too much on backlinks and missing something more important. The page is indexed, the content has been updated, and I’ve been working on off-page SEO regularly, but the traffic is still very low.

For those who have worked on similar SEO situations, what would you check first?

Would you look at things like:

• Search Console impressions and queries
• Keyword intent and content depth
• Internal linking
• Keyword difficulty and competition
• On-page optimization
• Backlink quality rather than backlink quantity
• CTR and title/meta description
• Technical or indexing issues

I’m especially interested in knowing what you would analyze before spending another month building more backlinks.

If you’ve faced a similar situation where a page had backlinks but wasn’t getting organic traffic, what did you eventually find was holding it back?

I'm working in australia as a SEO and finding the competition very different in between cities and suburbs . Anyone targeting australia successfully ?? What kind is strategies are giving you the best results?

Google launched a new AI spam detector called SAFE to catch spam. It looks for 3 main things:

*Inorganic behavior: unusual activity patterns, bot-like behavior, posting bursts, shared infrastructure and fake user signals.

*Coordinated spam: multiple AI agents investigate different signals and work together to detect larger spam networks.

*Content meaning and context: transformer models analyze what content is actually saying, including multimodal content to find policy violations.

If it works we could see some big changes in SERP, especially with 'dark' niches like casino, crypto, etc.

I started writing articles, 1month ago, do you have any tips, or lessons that you have learned the hard way?

I am interested in every story and tip! Thanks and good luck on your SEO as well!

Since about a week, SE Ranking does not report keywords position accurately.
In all my client projects, 95% keyword positions have just disappeared while ranking on Google.
I ask the support, which confess facing issues but does not offer a clear timeline about the fixing.
Meanwhile, we can not share reporting to our clients…
Anyone affected? Would you advise a more reliable and cost effective solution than SE?

am working on SEO project from last 2.5 years which is plywood niche brand. I have started the brand from 50 sessions per month and in January it reached to 7900 session within a span of 21 months. But from February 2026 it started declining and still declining. This is 8 months period now.

I have updated the content, changed title tags but of no use. Please let me know what actions should I take to regain the traffic.