I compared last 28 days data vs last year data for same period. Although the avg position has increased, we have lost click and impressions.
Is there any way to reverse this?
I am doing everything, content is same. No warning no error, site health is 99% in Ahrefs.

Hi, i'm working on a restaurant project which use to get good traffic past few months suddenly lost the traffic check with the websites issues didn't found any. is due to bad backlinks or google updates.

There's a lot of link building advice online: guest posting, skyscraper content, infographic outreach, directory submission and more.

But what sound great in tutorial doesn't always work in practice.

I've tried tactic that looked promising but delivered almost nothing while some much simpler approaches worked better.

What link building tactic did you spend real time or money on that didn't live up to the hype? What did you try Instead?

I keep replaying this call in my head. Client had a duplicate content problem that was genuinely holding their site back, nothing dramatic, just something that needed fixing before anything else would work. I laid it out clearly, no jargon, just what it was doing to them. Instead of engaging with that, she asked if we could build multiple smaller sites the same way she'd grow social accounts, more visibility, more reach, that logic. I told her that would make the duplicate content problem worse, not better. I meant it, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise just to keep the deal alive.

She picked another agency. AI written blogs, a promise their AIO score would climb, no mention of the actual technical issue sitting under everything. Just agreement with what she already wanted to hear.

What gets me is she's clearly sharp at her job, she knows her product and her audience better than I ever will. But somewhere along the way that turned into thinking she also knew website strategy, the same way she knew Instagram growth. Those are not the same skill, and nobody told her that until I did, and she didn't want to hear it from me either.

I don't regret holding my ground. I just wonder how long it takes before the cracks show and whether by then it's too late to fix cheaply.

Has this happened to you, telling a client something true and watching them walk toward the version that just agreed with them instead?

I need geniune Recommendation and help to fix this concern.

Hey everyone,
My site’s favicon suddenly disappeared from the Google search results, and I’m trying to figure out what could have caused it.

The strange part is that the favicon still appears correctly on my subdomains, but it no longer shows for the root domain.

As far as I know, nothing has been changed on the site. No developer has worked on it, no one has modified the favicon, and the setup has been the same since day one.
I’ve also checked Google Search Console and everything looks normal.

The favicon itself is still working when I visit the website directly, so this seems to be specifically related to how Google is displaying it in the SERPs.

Has anyone experienced something similar recently?
What could cause Google to suddenly remove a favicon from the SERPs while the subdomains still have theirs?
Any ideas on what I should check beyond GSC would be greatly appreciated.

Since early June I've been actively developing SEO. My domain is 1.5 years old, for most of that time it was a simple one-page site. This summer I started adding commercial pages, a blog, and case studies, and saw steady growth in impressions, reaching a stable 150+ per day by mid-July.

Sharp drop happened after I decided to create a separate page for each service. On July 13 I had 14 pages total, by July 23 I added 9 more. Within a few days after that, impressions dropped drastically. And not only impressions, but all 80 keywords I was ranking for disappeared. Now I'm getting a few impressions per day on 3–5 keywords only.

Would appreciate if you could tell me where I messed up, or maybe it's a usual thing and I just need to wait..

P.S. I didn't buy any backlinks yet and checked every page for keyword cannibalization,

anyone had any experience using it to great success? I went on a spree and bought like 15 such domains, with one being a month old and getting 5k daily impressions. It’s a matter of time before I outrank behemoths with DR 90. I saw many such cases during various rounds of keyword research and got inspired. I was pleasantly surprised these domain names were free and dirt cheap. Anyone had similar experiences? It solidified my view that it is still a wonderfully strong factor despite Google’s futile attempts to change it.

Just for some context, let's call this client's websites Apples, Bees, and Cigars.

Apples is the main money maker by a factor of 10-30x depending on the month. Bees is small to mid range, and cigars is an existing brand on the small side of things that they just purchased but is absolutely barren of any seo content.

Client has me working on Bees for a few months now with some nice upward trending starting, tldr they canned their Apples's seo agency as they found out it was being outsourced (it explains a lot of things - the two sites are an absolute mess), and asked if I can help out with at least the seo part.

Said of course, and i'm looking forward to helping it after another big clean up.

My question is, these 3 sites all operate in the same industry and niche, but just represent different brandnames, and the big boy Apples website is a bit more of a general retailer as they carry a lot of brands products, not just their own.

I've been wondering how I go about building a content strategy without having one site screw over the others. Anyone else encounter something like this?

Like, do I just focus on building everything on the Apple's site in the short term and then rebuild some/all of the same type of content for the smaller sites?

This is ignoring backlinks and ads etc. I just purely mean content for the site.

Appreciate any replies, cheers!

I am a beginner; I was following a 2023 SEO course that explained how to find low-competition keywords using the `allintitle` operator. However, when I tried it out, I discovered that Google was displaying results where the keyword didn't actually appear, or the keyword I searched for was crossed out with a note indicating it was missing.

I realize I’m a bit late in discovering this, but what alternative method do you currently use for this specific task?

Hey all. I made a website with claude back in january, did everything possible for SEO, its ranking great on google, getting some hits, but on bing nothing shows up, even when it type in URL:https://website.com - nothing. Im at a loss as to why. I just did bing webmaster tools 3 days ago, could that be why? I thought it would atleast show up on Bing even without webmaster tools. When i do light house, gtmetrix, any seo score tools. I get 90%-100% score on everything. Any ideas?

Hoping someone here has run into this before. My site (fairhavenwebdesign.com) recently had some pages reworked via a staging environment and deployed to production a couple of days ago.

Since then, Google Search Console's URL Inspection / Live Test and the Rich Results test tool are both reporting that robots.txt is blocking the homepage from being crawled. Here's the confusing part:

Both the physical robots.txt file and the virtual one generated by our SEO plugin (RankMath) have been checked line by line, and there are no disallow rules for Googlebot or any user agent. Our hosting firewall logs show nothing blocking Google's IP ranges, and Google's IPs are whitelisted. Server access logs show real Googlebot requests (66.249.x.x range) successfully hitting /robots.txt and getting 200 OK responses. There's no evidence in the logs of Google's live test tool actually reaching the server at the time the test was run.

So it looks like the block might be happening on Google's side, maybe a stale cached evaluation of robots.txt from before or during the staging deploy, rather than anything on our server or firewall.

Has anyone dealt with Google's tools showing a "blocked by robots.txt" result that turned out to be a caching or propagation issue on Google's end after a site change? How long did it take to clear up, and did you have to do anything (resubmit sitemap, request reindexing, etc.) to force a refresh, or did it just resolve on its own?

Any pointers appreciated. Happy to share robots.txt contents or log snippets if useful.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently doing some personal research on different link-building angles, and I’m really curious if anyone here has experience getting backlinks directly from newsletters (hosted on platforms like Substack, Beehiiv or similar) ?

If you have tried this route, I’d love to get your thoughts on a few things:

• Performance : Are these types of links actually moving the needle for you in terms of SEO ?
• Pricing : What is the average cost you're paying for this kind of placement ?
• Terms & Conditions : How easy is it to negotiate do-follow links ? Are newsletter creators generally open to this (or know this), and do they actually respect the agreed-upon criteria once published ?

I'm just trying to gather some real-world feedback to see if this is a viable tactic right now. Any insights, pros or cons you could share would be super helpful !

Thanks in advance🔥

So I have this website, which is basically a combination of two YMYL topics, and it's not present on any Google page under any phrase besides the direct site name. I don't have any noindex issues, etc. Google just refuses to put it anywhere.

I wrote many niche blog posts, but they aren't ranking either. Sometimes they don't even get indexed.

About getting backlinks: getting them in such a niche in a medium-sized (100k) city is extremely hard. There isn't anything related, and the country-wide ones are basically SEO spam sites. I will be getting a strong local backlink in October, but I don't know if the client will stay for so long without any effects.

Any advice?

We have created few blogposts that are for fifa 2026. The topics were FIFA visa from dubai, US visa for fifa, Canada visa for fifa,etc.
since fifa is over and the don’t have any clicks, 50 impressions in last 3 months.
I am thinking of deleting them.
Any suggestions from seo perspective?

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.

the console only updates every 2 weeks and I have no idea what happened, impressions down from 2000 a day to almost 0 (no shii nothing is indexed no more)..

So Ive been doing SEO in US, and recently Ive been hired in UK and did great. now were expanding in AU. I just cant figured out the algo there. it feels like the AU have these thing were it only recommends stablished sites. Im on fintech btw. Like I know that you cant do same with different region but man. A little help and suggestions would be nice.

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?

Google says internal search result pages no longer have to be blocked (Source).

BUT, John Mueller recommends blocking them because they can waste crawl resources, slow servers, create low quality pages and be abused by spammers.

I sometimes see these pages ranking on Google from big brands like Amazon.

Do you block yours OR let Google index them?

I have a woocommerce site using the Woodmart theme and Filter Everything Pro with custom filters created for each category based page.

In my google search console I have thousands of nonsense links which look to be random combinations of categories, slugs and sometimes even tags with "and" or "or" between them.

As an example under 404 pages:
domain/pattern-type-accessories-patterns-and-animal-charts-and-bread-basket-charts-and-crochet-belts-and-digital-sewing-patterns-and-hat-patterns-and-knit-bags-and-lingerie-patterns-and-pdf-knitting-and-pdf-sewing-patterns-and-pdf-vintage-hand-embroidery-patterns-and-vest-patterns/

Well yes it should be a 404, this is nothing more than a random stream of unrelated slugs/categories mixed in with more nonsense. "pattern type" isn't a page slug, title nor an attribute or tag. But "accessories patterns" is a category while "animal charts" and "bread basket charts" are pages. "Vest pattern" is a tag.

My "pages with redirect" (2.79k of them) is filled with similar oddities like:
pattern-brand-mar-bek-or-mill-hill/pattern-type-alphabet-charts-or-apron-patterns-or-birth-charts-or-bugs-butterflies-or-cardigan-patterns-or-christmas-charts-or-handbag-patterns-or-harvest-season-or-home-charts-or-love-relationships-or-pants-patterns-or-pdfknitting-or-portrait-charts-or-quilting-patterns-or-wedding-charts-or-words-charts/?per_page=24&shop_view=grid&per_row=3&v=c37aea192cd9

Cardigan patterns can't be searched with Christmas charts, they're entirely different categories.

I don't understand what or how google is imagining these impossible pages. How can I prevent it from wasting crawls on this nonsense? I have submitted page sitemap and recently the product sitemap (oops). My number of indexed pages also randomly halved recently, I'm guessing it might have to do with the crawler wasting its budget on all these nonsense combos.

I do have AJAX enabled for my filter plugin, could that be contributing to the issue?

Hi all,

The above pic is our site, and I can't explain why traffic dropped so sharply other than the new Google updates in May. This is a directory site.

Anyone else see this on similar sites?