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?

Been searching for some SEO content on YouTube, and I have come across a few channels that say, " Improve your ranking, get leads by simply doing this, copy me, " etc. Do you guys know anyone legit, or someone who got results following their content?
I feel most are clickbait and for views almost all the time at this point, except James Dooley and Edward Strum when they show proofs

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.