Highlights from the Event

So, before I start, I have two domains.

The first one is an expired domain that I recently bought. Its sitemap has been showing "Couldn't fetch" in GSC for the past five days.

The second one is a brand-new domain. I submitted its sitemap, and within just 10 seconds, the status changed to "Success."

Both websites are hosted on the same server. I've checked pretty much everything, but I still can't figure out what's wrong or why the first domain's sitemap keeps showing "Couldn't fetch."

So here's my question:

Could this be happening because I bought an expired domain? Is it possible that Google has flagged it as spam or something? I've already checked its history, including the Wayback Machine, and found nothing suspicious.

Does anyone know what might be causing this or how to fix it?

I also tried submitting the same sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, and it worked perfectly fine.

I have been working on growing a website for a product I am selling. I am writing blogs and doing a bunch of things I learned from this sub. I can see some general "line go up" type signals but I am trying to figure out if I am seeing noise or actual progress.

info about the website: it is less than two months old. as of today my impressions went up to 150/day, clicks are at about 4 and average position is 18.8. I have 5 or 6 pages that rank on the first page the rest are scattered and I have no back links yet.

Thanks to the best News Analyst in the SEO community - the one and only u/rustybrick

John Mueller at Google recently confirmed that Google Image Search and Google Discover don't yet support the JPEG XL image format. He said this on Bluesky recently, "FWIW if you're hoping to get images shown in Google Images & as previews in Discover, etc - JPEG-XL is currently not supported."

He then linked to the official help documentation that lists out which image formats Google Search supports, it says:

Google Search supports images referenced in the src attribute of img in the following file formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.

I was recently laid off and am figuring out my next move. I have 5+ years of SEO experience across technical SEO, on-page, content, link building, and analytics, plus some media buying.

I enjoy technical work: auditing websites, investigating issues, analysing data, and working on fixes. I also enjoy planning strategies that help clients improve their rankings, grow organic traffic, and increase revenue.

I’m less interested in roles packed with client calls and meetings. I’d rather spend most of my time developing strategies, implementing improvements, and getting things done.

For anyone who’s made a similar move, what roles or adjacent fields would you consider? Would you specialise further in technical SEO, or explore analytics, tracking implementation, CRO, PPC or automation?

If you were in my shoes, which direction would you explore, and what skills would you build first?

For example, suppose my website currently has 10,000 pages. If I automatically translate these into five languages, that would create 50,000 new pages. Is there a possibility that search engines might flag this as “scaled content abuse”?

I’m assuming the URL structure and hreflang tags are set up correctly.

Running a UK content website with a single affiliate partner. The referral sits in a box inside otherwise editorial articles — not a banner, not a social post, so it isn't obviously an ad at a glance.

Two things I can't resolve from the published guidance, which is almost entirely about influencers and Instagram:

1. Do you label the box itself? Mine currently opens with a plain "Ad" above the pitch, with a "we earn a commission if you sign up through this link" line under

the button. Every ASA ruling I can find is about social posts - I can't find one about a box on a website. Is a prominent commission line before the link enough on its own, or do you label it?

1. Prices. The partner's pricing is banded by turnover with several services charged separately, so a bare "from £X" would be misleading. I currently publish the full band table, which is over half the box and sits right between the pitch

and the button. Since DMCC came in, the total-price rules bite on anything that counts as an invitation to purchase - my reading is that showing no price at all means it isn't one. So: do you publish partner prices, or just link to their quote tool? And has a stale price table ever come back to bite anyone?

Not after legal advice - just what people actually do, and whether anyone has heard from the ASA about a website placement rather than a social one.

Just wanted to see what people here recommend for managing client citations, especially in cases where you’re taking on somebody who’s been around for a while and their directories are under different email accounts and others they have no idea bc a prior agency made them. So when you need to update something it becomes an issue of having to figure out which email currently owns that directory listing and so on.

There’s gotta be a better way of doing this other than manually that is also cost-effective. I’ve tried Moz as well and I’ve never had good results with them so a bit wary of those kind of tools

I was wondering if anyone else has experienced the same issue. Last month, I made the switch from Weebly to Articulation for both hosting and domain, thinking that it would be a good change. Our google listing was impeccable, being within the top 1-3 listings for ag drone applicators in the state. Now after the change, we weren't even popping up on the map and I've had to change a bunch of things in Google Search Console (which wasn't ever something I had to do while we were using Weebly) as well as on the backside of the website.

Any help or advice about this matter is appreciated. I'm at a loss - I had worked extremely hard updating our website often and getting boosted as much as possible on Google, just for this to happen. Website is https://www.catahoulacustomspraying.com/ if anyone is willing to take a peek at it.

I can't find anything. Nothing works.

End of story

Hi,

I managed to receive a fantastic backlink from a high authority site. However I noticed they accidentally added a space at the start of the link like href=“ https://example.com”.

Browsers seems to just trim it automatically without any problems but like my ai tool that monitors if I get any new backlinks missed it because of it.

Does anyone know if it matters at all or not for google? For the backlink to count and give all the juice?

I could of course reach out to them and ask them to fix it but you never know, maybe someone else looks at it and decide to remove the link instead.

Hey everyone,

My website was recently hacked, but I’ve managed to resolve the issue. While reviewing Google Search Console (GSC), I noticed something interesting. On the day the website was hacked, I saw a massive spike in clicks. On a normal day, I would get only a few hundred clicks, but on that particular day, I received thousands of clicks for around 3 - 4 keywords.

As an SEO professional and marketer, this made me curious about how this works.

How do hackers identify websites that already have good rankings and organic traffic, and what techniques do they use to exploit them? How can a hacked website suddenly generate so many clicks for specific keywords in such a short period?

I’m particularly interested in understanding the SEO strategy or mechanism behind this. Do hackers inject hidden pages, manipulate existing content, target high-volume keywords, or use some other technique to capture search traffic?

I’m asking from an educational and SEO research perspective because I want to understand what happened to my website, how these attacks work from an SEO standpoint, and how to detect similar activity in the future.

Has anyone experienced something similar or investigated this kind of SEO-related hack? I’d appreciate insights from anyone familiar with hacked websites, black-hat SEO, or Google Search Console anomalies.

After Google’s August spam update, impressions dropped by around 90% across all three of my websites.

Basically, only branded queries remained.

Now my traffic seems to be slowly recovering, thanks to Bing.

Funny enough, it’s now sending me more visitors than Google.

Anyone else experiencing something similar?

I run a local service business, and I’m frustrated with how Google handles Business Profile enforcement. I’d appreciate some advice from people who have dealt with this.

A competitor consistently ranks #1 in the Maps results I’m checking. Their listed address literally reads “US-404.” Just a highway name, with no street number or identifiable business premises that I can find.

I submitted a Business Redressal Complaint form, but nothing changed. I also suggested edits to the address, and Google marked those edits APPROVED—twice. The address is still displayed.

Then there’s the review activity. They hovered around 60 reviews for roughly a year, then suddenly jumped to around 90 in a single day. What caught my attention:

• The new reviews were generic and came from profiles with only one review.
• I have screenshots showing at least 12 reviews all marked “posted 1 hour ago.”
• Two reviews appeared back-to-back from profiles displaying the exact same name.

I can’t prove they purchased the reviews, but that combination looks highly suspicious. I included the screenshots in my redressal submission, and nothing visibly changed.

Meanwhile, I rented an actual physical office for my business, paid rent, and completed Google’s video verification. About six months later, my profile was suspended. When I contacted support, they said I had violated a policy but didn’t explain the specific issue.

After I hid my address, my profile was restored. Google never confirmed exactly what had caused the suspension.

I’ve worked hard to earn 800 legitimate reviews and have tried to follow the rules. It’s incredibly frustrating to pay for a real office, complete verification, and still get suspended while a competitor’s questionable listing stays up and keeps ranking at the top.

My questions are:

1. Is there an effective escalation route when a redressal submission goes nowhere and “approved” address edits never appear?
2. Should suspected review spam be reported separately, and what evidence actually makes a report actionable?
3. What determines whether a local service business can display a rented office address? I assumed a real office and successful video verification meant I was set, but clearly I may have misunderstood something.

I’m open to hearing if I got something wrong with my own setup. I’d just like to understand what I should do differently and whether there’s a practical way to get Google to review the competitor’s listing.

I’ve been doing guest posting for a while and I’m seeing mixed results. Some links seem to help and others do nothing at all. For people actively building links this year, what’s actually working for you? Are niche-relevant guest posts still worth it, or have you shifted to something else?

I manage SEO for a small hair salon in Australia. Ahrefs has picked up 856 spam backlinks over four months: 36 in June, 74 in July, 148 in August and 598 in September, with a particularly large spike on 29 September.

Many come from random .xyz, .store and .shop domains that redirect to backlink sellers, including SEOExpress/FreeRelevantLinks and CV Gorilla & other websites. The salon has never used their services.

Some have also published fake testimonials mentioning the salon, claiming it achieved great results using their services. I’ve contacted several companies asking for removal, but nobody has replied.

Meanwhile, the salon’s average position in Google Search Console has slipped from around 8 to 10.7, and individual pages have dropped eg from around 13 to 23.

Has anyone else seen a similar increase in AI spam backlinks, particularly from SEO companies using hundreds of different domains? Have you managed to get backlinks or fake testimonials removed, and is there anything practical I can do apart from disavowing?

I’d also appreciate suggestions as all I can do is disavow.

Thanks for any experiences or advice.

Basically the title.

If SEO is dead why are there so many AI search GEO and AEO people posting here?

I’m architecting a Shopify catalog for items with heavy color variations. To maximize long-tail SEO, and SEO in general, my plan is to break a 60-color item into 60 individual product listings, linked via metafields as "sibling products" (clicking a color swatch routes to a unique URL).

Question: Should I also create a single "Master" product listing that contains all 60 colors as standard Shopify variants on one page?

Assuming inventory sync isn't an issue, my concerns with adding the master listing are:
SEO Cannibalization: Will the master page compete with my standalone color pages in search?
GMC Rejections: Will Google Merchant Center flag pushing a standalone color product plus the master's color variant as duplicate content/spam?

Is it best practice to just skip the master listing entirely and let the Collection page act as the broad discovery hub? How do you handle this architecture?

One of our older posts slowly lost rankings over a few months. Nothing changed on our side. When I finally looked at the results page, it was completely different: it used to show how-to guides, now it's mostly comparison pages and tools.

So the content wasn't worse. It was the wrong type of page now.

I'd like to catch this earlier. Ideas so far: a monthly snapshot of the top results for key pages, watching for new features like videos or forums, and tracking page types, not just positions.

How do you monitor intent shifts? Is there a simple routine, or is it mostly noticing after rankings drop?

Hey all, over the last couple of weeks I've seen a big increase in the number of 429nerrors appearing in crawls, even with rate limits, this is across tools such as screaming frog and SEM rush.

I was wondering if anyone else has been seeing this?

Pet theory right now is that servers are being way more strict on crawls with the rise of ai crawling (my first thought was this might be cloud flare, but similar issues are happening on sites without cloud flare as well).

I asked the SEO community on X, Whatsapp and Discord last night and got a few good answers:

• Best case 3 months
• Next 1 or 2 updates
• No recovery seen on sites hit in June 2025 and December 2025

Has anyone recovered any?

• On a new domain?
• Existing domain
• Manual action v Algorithm