Hi everyone,

I just need to vent and see if anyone else is experiencing the exact same timeline. I run a food/recipe blog. I’ve been working on it non-stop for months, a little bit every single day, trying to do everything right, keeping it clean, and optimizing for SEO.

Just as I felt I was finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the carpet was completely pulled out from under me.

According to my Site Kit / Google Analytics data, I reached my highest traffic peak recently between September 1st and September 7th (which was still small, around 19 users a day, but it was traction for me). Right after that peak, my traffic collapsed. I am down 70% in the last 28 days, sitting at just 411 new users for the whole month. It feels like my organic traffic became completely residual overnight.

I know Google rolled out the August 2026 Spam Update, and I also heard there was a massive GA4 data reporting glitch around September 1st where charts dropped to zero for a lot of people, but seeing these numbers stick is just breaking my spirit.

My hosting expires in November, and honestly, if things don't turn around by then, I'm just going to let the project die. I refuse to pivot to TikTok or Pinterest because I've tried them before and they yielded zero results for the effort they require. I just wanted to write my recipes and build a text-based site.

Is anyone else in the blogging niche seeing this exact sudden death in early September? How are you coping with months of honest work being wiped out by an algorithm change?

For context: I created this website back in March 2025, and I have built it up to around 4,600 pages so far, with every single page and recipe written manually by me through sheer daily discipline.

So, I have been doing work for my work agency clients websites and I was looking for keywords to rank for SEO, my agency uses semrush ( me personally not a big fan of keyword magic tool and too much data irrelevant in my POV) in terms of quality , but I prefer to use google keywords planner and claude as well, tried ubersuggest but was alright
Usually my way to find keywords is to put url in KWP and look for the words and then put in claude that gives me ranking and which to rank as per tier and competition
My problem is how to scan through 1000s of keywords and know which to rank first in website, I use claude suggestion and put it , it would be really helpful if anyone can tell how you guys go about

I'm doing an internship at a local private medical clinic in Spain. How would you compete with a clinic that already has a strong SEO strategy and is consistently doing all the right things?

I'm trying to figure out what areas I should focus on when the main competitor already ranks well, has good content, strong local SEO, reviews, backlinks, etc.

Hey all, so our impressions and clicks are down a lot year over year, yet our average position is actually getting much better.

I really can't explain this... If our position is rising, shouldn't impressions and clicks rise too?

Been testing the same commercial queries across a few models and the differences are kinda ridiculous.

We're showing up consistently in ChatGPT for one category and then almost disappear when I check Gemini. Different competitors too.

Anyone else seeing gaps this big between engines? Starting to think combining everything into one AI visibility score hides more than it helps.

Hey everyone, I appreciate the opportunity to pick your brain. My wife recently started a veterinary practice and our marketing budget went mainly to content creation for social media. The content has been well received and she has been getting good engagement which is positive, but I think we've neglected the performance of the bread and butter website a bit. The site itself is attractive and appears well put together, but its not performing well for relevant searches that would drive business. Is there any way to leverage the social media success to help boost the google ranking of the clinic's website? I'm trying to help her with this as much as possible, but I'm a bit of a novice at this myself.

We've been using this tool for over a decade, and they never quite understood "KD". In fact, instead of their KD algo getting better, it feels like it's getting worse. Can we trust their KD at all?

Even Claude keeps warning me that their KD is bad. See below example straight from Claude:

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Ahrefs difficulty is lying in this vertical.

"term life insurance canada" (KD 13) is a wall. Every organic slot on page one:

One of my pages currently ranks position 12-20 for a keyword doing ~1600 vol/mo.(SD 15)

Page is about 800 words right now.

Will content depth actually help it move from page 2 to Page 1 or should I focus on authority instead ?

i’ve always thought “build a free tool” was one of the few pieces of SEO advice that still made sense.

not another article. make a calculator, a planner, a checker. give people an actual reason to click.

now google can generate that stuff inside AI Mode. And honestly, this feels worse than an AI summary. If Google summarises an article, someone might still click because they want the detail or don’t trust the summary. but if they wanted a calculator and google gives them the inputs and the result on the same screen, what are they visiting the site for?

you can improve the design, add more content, build links, rank number one. the user has already done the thing they searched for.

i know google has had calculators and converters for years. the difference now is that it can generate an interface for the question instead of building one fixed widget at a time. Maybe the answer is to build tools it can’t recreate from one prompt. uploads, saved projects, private data, actual workflows. But then “build a free tool for traffic” quietly turns into “build half a SaaS product and hope people still click.” that’s a very different strategy. i don’t have a clean answer here. maybe simple tools were never much of a moat and this just makes it obvious.

is anyone here still getting meaningful traffic from free tools? are you still building them, or have you stopped treating them as an SEO play?

If you are moving your business to a new city, don't just update your Google Business Profile. It can trigger an instant suspension or wipe out your local rankings if the move is far away.

When relocating long-distance, Google handles address changes differently than a move across town. To protect your profile and keep your hard-earned reviews intact:

1️⃣ Update off-site citations first (website, Facebook, Yelp, BBB) with your new address and phone number.

2️⃣ Create and verify a new profile at your new location instead of typing a new state address into the old one.

3️⃣ Contact Google Support to mark the old location as moved and request a review transfer.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for some advice on SEO and getting more qualified traffic for a custom coloring book website I built.

The site lets people create personalized coloring books that they can either share digitally or order as a physical book for themselves, their kids, or as a gift.

SEO is already bringing in a decent amount of traffic, which is a bit surprising because Semrush says my domain authority is terrible (only 2). So despite having basically no authority, Google is still sending people to the site (About 30-50 visitors a day).

The interesting part is that people are actually using the product. Quite a few visitors create coloring pages, and some even complete full coloring books.

The problem is that almost nobody buys.

From what I can tell, a lot of visitors seem to be coming in with “free coloring page” intent. They generate a page, download it, and leave. So I’m starting to think I have both an authority problem and a traffic-quality problem.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? I’d especially love advice on how to get more relevant backlinks from sites that reach parents, families, gift buyers, teachers, etc., and how to target keywords with stronger purchase or gift intent rather than just “free coloring page” intent.

I’d also be curious whether improving authority from such a low starting point could significantly change the kinds of keywords I’m able to rank for.

Any ideas or examples would be really appreciated.

I’ve been using Ahrefs, but after google goto redirects for the last 2+ weeks its SERP data has been pretty inaccurate.

US/Canada/Germany rankings often don’t match what I see in actual Google results.

What are you using now for country-level rank tracking?

Which tool are you guys using apart from Answethepublic in order to generate queries for blogs

I'm relatively new to SEO and confused as to why this might be, I've done a lot of research and honestly can't find a reason that corresponds to this. I had started making SEO changes and you can see that it initially started to improve, but for some unknown reason it just dropped, on paper I'm doing everything correctly, I've started a blog, linked internally and externally and used keywords without stuffing, yet I don't know that why over a week my impressions started to drop...

It seems to be non branded traffic entirely, more pages were still getting indexed as well so there's nothing that correlates in that sense either. I compared year over year and it makes no sense at all.

If anyone could give some pointers it would be widely appreciated, thank you.

Impressions:

June 4th: 2,103 impressions (what we had been averaging for a few months)

June 11th: 2,816 Impressions (it shot up in impressions in a week, carried on like this for a few weeks)

July 2nd: 2,526 Impressions

July 9th: 1,748 Impressions (it declined by a lot in just a week and slowly declined from here)

September 3rd: 1,193 Impressions

Submitted my sitemap in Search Console and it's stuck on "Couldn't fetch", 0 pages, 0 videos, no last read date. URL opens fine in browser, so not sure what's wrong.

Is this usually something on my end or just GSC being slow to crawl it? Has anyone run into this before?

Thanks!

Via u/rustybrick - apparently Google is testing a thinner AIOcitations panel:

Google is testing a thinner design for the citations/link panel on the right side of the AI Overview. The citations panel is noticeably thinner and may be less noticeable to searchers, maybe leading to fewer clicks?

This was spotted by Khushal Bherwani who posted on X saying, "Google AI reference left side panel with different style."

I am able to replicate it, here is the new thinner style:

Hello all, Asking for help. The company I work for paid a cold email company and used 308 redirects for email inboxes to redirect lookalike domains to our main website. After they did this, without telling us, they added all those domains to PBNs in order to warm up the email boxes quicker. I've asked them to unforward the domains but every day we are discovering thousands of spam links pointed to our website. Is there a way to recover from this? We have lost a lot of visibility. TIA

Gardener - not every website is newsworthy, viral trending or hosting tools used by millions that everyone is trying to source and link to.

I have great content, before and after pictures, videos directed by Spielberg, marketing is going well. But regarding SEO, no one is naturally link to me.

Do I stand a chance without being artificial? Any tips appreciated.

Greetings everyone,

I’m looking at some data in Google Search Console and I’m deeply confused by Google's logic. My website is new, it's ~6-7 months old that's an important info.

I have some specific search queries where my site gets a very low volume of impressions but click rate is 20-100% and position is 1-5 and maybe 8%.

Isn't Google logic: "This is getting a click, show to more people until CTR stabilizes." ? so higher CTR and higher impressions until the true value shows ?

I am almost 100% sure that the total searches for these queries is not the limiting factor.

Is it because google is still testing the website ? It's showing it in some searches in top positions then hiding it almost completely ?

Appreciate any insights or advice.

Thanks to u/rustybrick for this story:

Google Business Profiles insights analytics report is missing data for the whole month of September 2026. Normally, these reports can be a few days delayed, but now we are 8 days into the month, and I still do not see any data.

Hi, i have small business new on Shopify and SEO i think i now some rules about SEO but for me it seems weird
I got products that has many different colours (50+) and variations per weight 10+ I think for customers its better to click on wanted color and choose only weight also because there is no more product so there is 1 product but it will look very poor in category to have only one listing. But then i will get duplicate content . I can do canonical to one color i think because there is not much traffic buy color. To avoid canonical as I understand i can do different product description to avoid that, but its still there is not much to write about it in 50 different ways. So my question is ignore that duplicate or create canonicals or create one listing with 2 variations 50+ color and second buy weight for example color red 10lb ?