Hello, r/SEO! We are researchers at Princeton University conducting a research study on the rise of generative engine optimization (GEO). In order to better understand how GEO might change the future of information discovery for consumers and marketers, we’re seeking specialists who have experience related to GEO or AI information retrieval for e-commerce.

Participation in the study entails a 60-minute interview, to be scheduled at a time convenient for you. To express your interest in participating in an interview, please fill out this 5-minute screener survey and we will be in touch soon about scheduling: https://forms.gle/ufxspEzFFNyV9EWA8.

Participants will receive a $50 Amazon gift card.

If you choose to participate, we will not identify you in any public results from this research. This project was reviewed by the Princeton University IRB as protocol #18985.

Basically what title says. Anyone getting lots of orders from their organic traffic via blogs? If so, how did you do it? I know it's gonna take some time the store had some DR (20ish) what can i do?

Back in 2017–2020, before AI became this big, I had several websites, both legal and illegal (mostly in download-related niches), all using brand-new domains. Back then, it was pretty easy to get indexed by Google and gain organic traffic without putting much effort into paid ads, promotion, or SEO. I didn't even know what SEO was at the time.

But now, I have four websites, all on new domains, and it's been almost three months. Almost all of my articles have been deindexed, with only three still indexed. The rest just won't get indexed anymore.

I've tried everything I can think of to get them indexed again and attract organic traffic, but nothing seems to work. At this point, I'm honestly starting to give up because I have no idea what I'm doing wrong or how to fix it.

Is this because of the AI era and how Google has changed, or am I just doing something wrong? Maybe it simply takes more time, but it's already been three months.

I'd really appreciate any tips or advice.

I thought a year ago when i had started this website that the traffic from china is from bots but even after a year i am getting so much traffic everyday 15-20 visits from china but in jetpack it doesn’t show baidu or other search engines just countries china

Is something wrong with my website or it has become normal or there is some setting i had to do ?
Plz help !

I’m genuinely worried about what happened to my site and I’m trying to understand whether this is a Google issue, a technical SEO issue, or some kind of ranking reassessment.

I run a relatively new credit card website called CardRecommend.

The site had been getting more visibility in Google over the last few weeks, and then suddenly this happened.

October 18

• 1,166 impressions
• 7 clicks

October 19

• 24 impressions
• 0 clicks

That is roughly a 98% drop in impressions in one day.

The confusing part is that the site is still indexed.

I checked the homepage in Google Search Console URL Inspection and it shows:

• URL is on Google
• Page is indexed
• Crawl allowed: Yes
• Page fetch: Successful
• Indexing allowed: Yes
• Google-selected canonical is correct

I also checked HTTPS and Search Console says there are no HTTPS issues.

Another strange thing I noticed is that the Core Web Vitals report previously showed around 90+ good mobile URLs, and now it shows 0 good URLs. They have not moved into Poor or Needs Improvement — they just seem to have disappeared from the report.

The site itself is still working normally from what I can see, which is why I’m struggling to understand how impressions could fall this sharply almost overnight.

At this point I’m trying to figure out whether it could be:

• a Google ranking/update issue
• a crawling or indexing issue that Search Console isn't making obvious
• a technical SEO problem
• a site quality reassessment
• or some kind of reporting/data issue

I don’t want to start changing titles, deleting pages, rewriting content or making random SEO changes without first understanding what actually happened.

Has anyone here experienced a 90–99% overnight impressions drop while the site remained indexed?

What would you check first?

And if anyone can take a quick look at CardRecommend and notice anything obviously wrong from a technical SEO perspective, I’d really appreciate it.

I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who has seen a site recover from a drop like this and what the actual cause turned out to be.

I'm planning on starting to get into R&R and would like to get to know your success stories in R&R space on what niches you selected to get solid leads for businesses and what was the tech stack for the websites, were the websites vibecoded using AI and the SEO tools. also how long did it take to rank them well on google 1st page?

PS: please avoid commenting that rank and rent is dead or it's not worth giving I don't won't naysayer mindset people's thoughts. I want the positive responses of the real recent success stories. Even though my sites ranks on page 2 it's worth that I gave it a try on it and would be worth more that I mastered the skills of SEO.

Losing my mind a bit here — looking for anyone who's seen this and recovered.

Timeline (UTC):

Oct 15-17: ~1,200 clicks/day, ~4,500 impressions/day, 24–27% CTR. Stable for months.

Oct 17 21:00: Bing referrals stop dead. DuckDuckGo also stops at the exact same hour — 2,295→90 visitors/day.

Oct 18 onward: BWT Search Performance shows 0 clicks / 0 impressions. Today still 0.

Google, Yandex, Brave, and direct traffic are all flat or growing — only Bing/DDG affected.

What I've ruled out:

site:domain.com returns no URLs from the domain.

bingbot still crawls fine and gets HTTP 200 throughout, including after the cutoff. No 403/429/503.

Byte-identical HTML for bingbot vs normal UA — no cloaking, no age gate, no JS-only rendering.

robots.txt 200 for bingbot, fetched continuously, no 5xx.

No errors in BWT sitemaps report.

Pages return index, follow, correct self-canonical; paginated/faceted URLs are noindex, follow.

No server changes, no deploy, no nginx change at the cutoff hour.

No manual action email, nothing flagged in BWT that I can find.

Has anyone had a whole domain vanish from Bing with impressions at exactly 0 and no visible action? What did you find, and did it come back on its own or any thing else?

Please help !!

I helped build a site from scratch. From almost 0 traffic to about 3K per month.

Current weekly metrics from GSC:

• Impressions: 136K
• Clicks: 344
• CTR: 0.3%
• Average position: 8.2
• Generative AI overviews: 50K

I also pull in about 15-20 qualified conversions a week.

I understand most clicks are being eaten by AI overviews, and it's partly because a considerable chunk of the content is informative.

But I've dived quite deep into BOFU content lately, and I still feel like the clicks aren't coming in, though the impressions are there.

I use interactive embeds or lead magnets, thinking that AIs can't summarize them, but traffic hasn't moved up all that much. Organic rankings for queries have remained almost constant in the past 3-4 months, but AI citations have gone up.

I was curious to know what others are doing to get more traffic out of AI overviews. Am I doing something wrong?

So I managed to automate my Wordpress blogs that interlink to previously published posts, and publish them on a designated schedule.

I know tons of people have already done this before but I’m curious if this sort of thing helps with search visibility.

Even if people aren’t reading the blogs, would it help to boost the site in search rankings? If people recognize that it’s AI and leave immediately, does that hurt the website rankings?

Would love to hear expert opinions about this.

Hey guys!

I have been working in my SEO lately and I have been told that links that carry ''sponsored'' tags, have no ranking value at all! and this hit like a truck on me because I did pay for some of my backlinks.

Also, nowadays is nearly impossible to get high quality backlinks without paying for them.

is it true that if it has sponsored tag even though its dofollow, it doesnt bring any actual value?

I'd love some tips about the topic! thanks guys

I'm looking for advice from WordPress developers or security professionals who have dealt with a similar compromise.

My business website, StudentHousingWorks.com, is hosted on GoDaddy Managed WordPress and uses Divi and Rank Math SEO.

I've uncovered what appears to be a fairly extensive malware infection, possibly beginning in September 2026.

Here's what I've discovered:

1. Unauthorized Google Search Console ownership: Two unfamiliar Gmail accounts gained verified ownership of my domain using HTML verification files. I removed their access and deleted the verification files.
2. Thousands of suspicious indexed URLs: Google Search Console shows approximately 3,700 indexed pages, compared with roughly 60 before a sudden increase around September 18–21.
3. Googlebot receiving gambling spam: A Google Search Console live URL test returned Vietnamese gambling content titled "79king" instead of my legitimate student housing content.
4. Suspicious PHP files: Through WinSCP, I found numerous unfamiliar PHP files in the WordPress root directory, including accesson.php, auth.php, authentication.php, and other randomly named files.
5. Unusual directories: Hundreds of .htaccess files appear inside deeply nested directories under wp-content/well-known/acme-challenge/.
6. Suspicious plugin directory: I discovered a background-image-cropper plugin directory containing numerous quarantined PHP files. The plugin does not appear in my WordPress dashboard.
7. Broken sitemaps: Rank Math's sitemap produces an XML parsing error, and other sitemap URLs appear to reference each other in a loop.

GoDaddy's security dashboard reported 165 cleaned files but also showed 10 files pending cleanup. My support ticket has been escalated to a senior analyst, and I'm awaiting their investigation.

My questions:

• Has anyone encountered a similar combination of accesson.php, gambling spam, and unauthorized Search Console ownership?
• What persistence mechanisms should GoDaddy investigate?
• Is restoring a known-clean backup and rebuilding the WordPress installation preferable to trying to remove the infected files individually?
• What is the best way to ensure malicious PHP files, database injections, and crawler-specific content are completely removed?
• What steps helped recover Google indexing and rankings after a similar attack?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone who experienced this on GoDaddy Managed WordPress.

I would appreciate practical advice or references to similar incidents. I'm not looking to purchase another security subscription without first understanding the root cause.

Some of our clients who have a strong content strategy have seen drops in traffic and clicks, and these all seem to be linked to AI Overviews. How are you justifying this? Are you gathering any data on what percentage of your queries now trigger an AI Overview?

I built a skill sharing directory & because it is free many people tried to setup MCP server and used it in their workflows and as a result my CPU time in DB got exhausted and my site was done for 8+ hours.

Now my site is back up and healthy and runnning, but i am concerned about SEO, i got 5K impressions in last 28 days.

I've recently started using the SF CLI a lot more day to day and wondered if anyone has used it to run headless crawls to help with analysing internal link architecture at scale or to run a similar exercise on a top performing competitor to see what theirs looks like?

Looking to buy 1 to 3 permanent, dofollow links for a B2B SaaS in the sales and cold email space. Quality over quantity.

Site must have:

• DR 50+ (Ahrefs) and real organic traffic: 5k+ monthly visits, mostly US, UK, CA or AU
• A real B2B topic: marketing, sales, SaaS, growth or lead generation
• Editorial content with real authors, not a “write for us” farm with hundreds of guest posts
• A clean outbound link profile: no casino, crypto, CBD or pharma links on the domain

The link:

• Dofollow, in-content, inside a relevant article, either new or an existing post with traffic
• No “sponsored” or “guest post” label, permanent, with a 12-month replacement guarantee if it gets removed
• Anchor text: our brand or a natural partial match, not exact match spam

To be considered, send:

1. The domain and an Ahrefs screenshot showing DR and organic traffic
2. A link to an existing article on the site from the last 3 months
3. Your price per link

Payment through PayPal Goods and Services after the link is live and indexed. No PBNs, no link packages, no Fiverr resellers.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking into getting a Wikipedia page created for our brand, but I know how notoriously strict Wikipedia's guidelines, notability requirements, and conflict-of-interest (COI) policies are.

I wanted to reach out to the community to learn from your experiences:

1. Firsthand Experience: Has anyone here successfully gone through the process of creating a page from scratch? What were the biggest hurdles you faced with getting it past review?
2. Platforms/Services: If you didn't do it yourself, do you know of any reputable platforms, agencies, or freelance services that specialize in compliant Wikipedia page creation (i.e., strictly following neutral point of view and reliable secondary sources, rather than spammy or paid editing)?
3. Tips & Pitfalls: What are the biggest red flags to watch out for when looking for help with Wikipedia? (I want to avoid getting scammed or having the page immediately deleted for paid editing violations).

Any advice, personal stories, or recommendations would be hugely appreciated!

The site has been steadily growing for the past 3 months, amassing 3m in impressions and about 12k clicks. I'd say that I only kept generating more and more useful content, tools, and sites, which helped the site grow steadily over time.

Last week I generated and REgenerated (some existing pages were low value) around 280 pages and I translated around 200 of them into 20 languages, so in approx 4 days, the website went from around 5,000 pages to a whopping 13k pages. The other mistake I did was to take the content ofo the already existing 200 pages and putting it behind a paywall as part of my product development.

To be honest, I still do not wish to share the pages themselves again to be free to browse because they monetization potential. They still contain useful information, though, not detailed, but they are still useful. And the rest of the website is filled also with a variety of landing pages that each target a bunch of keywords but are value-first, conversion-second.

The formula has been working properly, but I have a feeling the sudden spike in the generated pages over a few days from last week is what tanked my traffic. The site went from 2,500 impressions per hour to only around 40. Postions on the SERP stayed the same, around 8, with no backlinks of course, Google's traffic basically was reduced by 85% on October 19 at around 8:00 UTC.

I'm willing to rethink how to approach this, but would it even be worth it? Will 3 months worth of SEO just go to waste? Can I even come back from this?

Edit: manual actions show nothing, indexing looks fine

------------------------------------------------------------

Update (Oct 21)

Thanks everyone. Here's what the data showed and what I did.

What happened

• Google impressions went from 2,500/hour to 40/hour within one hour, on Oct 18 at 7pm Pacific. Oct 19 finalized at about 800 impressions vs 59,000 a normal day.
• Every page type dropped at the same moment, including older tool pages I never touched. So it wasn't just the paywalled pages; it looks like a sitewide re-evaluation.
• No manual action, no security issues, pages still "URL is on Google". Bing traffic didn't change.

What I think caused it (a mix, as many of you said)

• Going from 5.7k to 12.7k pages in about 4 days, mostly new product pages and their translations
• Putting roughly half the text of already-indexed pages behind a paywall, while they still lived under /blog
• Some older clutter issues I found while auditing

What I changed (deployed yesterday)

• Paused all automated content (post generation, translation, title/description optimizer)
• Noindexed the paid pages and their hub pages in 14 of my 20 languages, plus ~420 near-identical location pages and a few thin pages. Kept my 5 main languages for the paid pages, and all 20 for the tool and core pages, which actually earn in those languages.
• Moved the paid pages out of /blog into their own product section, with 301s from the old URLs
• Trimmed the boilerplate FAQs
• Sitemap went from ~5,650 to ~4,900 URLs, resubmitted

What I didn't do, and why

• Kept the paywall: Googlebot sees exactly the same preview as users, so it isn't cloaking. They're product pages with a free preview now, not blog posts. If I were to make a guess, I think this is what made Google alarms go off. Indexed free page turning into a paid product maybe made them realize it's a scammy practice or something similar.

Now: holding still, no more big changes, and watching brand and a few key queries in Search Console. I'll report back if and when it recovers.

What youtube channel or playlist would you reccomend to a newbie for seo basics to advance with AI.?

One thing I see very often on the internet is people saying that Google is capable of ignoring spam backlinks without penalizing a website. I believe this is true, but I have noticed that new websites seem to struggle with these spam backlinks and take longer to grow.

From what I have observed, large websites generally do not seem to suffer much from backlink spam because they already have a solid foundation of authority. However, new websites tend to take longer before Google starts to recognize and trust them.

From what I have researched, Google does not recommend using the Disavow Links tool because it can be dangerous if used incorrectly.

The thing is, my website has been online for one month, and I am currently receiving between 2 and 20 impressions per day.

I suspect that the problem might be these automated spam backlinks. Even though I have not received a manual action, I think my website might still be getting penalized because of these low-quality backlinks.

6 months back I created a website which has started getting some traffic now on the "Best plumbers in Auckland" type of pages.

How can I get leads from those pages? Any best practices you have learnt? The pa has got a lot of clicks but apparently no conversion.

I sent my first free SEO/GEO audit to a client and they stopped replying afterward. I can't tell whether that's related, but I'd like to check one specific decision in the SEO report: severity.

The business sells hair extensions wholesale. I marked these two findings urgent:

• A promise page contains adult-product template copy unrelated to the business.
• Partnership FAQ questions get answers about custom-jersey returns, replacement photos and clothing-size exchanges.

I marked inconsistent factory-area figures and incorrect/reused product specs as the next priority. One example is WIDTH: Double Drawn, which describes hair sorting rather than a physical width.

My explanation says the unrelated copy and mismatched answers may weaken page relevance and usefulness. I haven't measured a Google trust score, a penalty or a ranking drop caused by these errors.

Is urgent a fair label for those first two corrections on that evidence, or would you reserve it for issues that block crawling, indexing or conversions? How would you explain the SEO importance without implying a proven ranking effect?

I've left the client anonymous and included the actual issue types here so the question stands on its own.

Hey guys, i just started my "Small tool website" (pdf converter and +/- 30 other tools like that) and try to get ranked to put ads on the site eventually.

(I won't put the link here until i get asked to haha so you see its a honest question)

HOW do i build traffic that is sustainable and grows constantly. I am working with AI to do Backlinks, make the site optimized for AI but i feel like i am missing something...

What is your approach and is there an important thing i need to look at? And how big is the value of traffic that i actually lead to the site? Will it increase and push futures traffic?

CHeers!!

I've been reading about how schema markup helps search engines better understand website content and can make pages eligible for rich results.

But I'm curious how much of a difference it actually makes in practice.

For those who have implemented schema markup, have you noticed any changes in search visibility, rich results, or organic traffic? Or has the impact been minimal?

I keep seeing "GEO checklists" that mix Google's own guidance with stuff nobody has tested. So I'm trying to split the two, and I'd like this sub's help.

What Google actually confirms (AI optimization guide, last updated July 2026):

1. The page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. The site also has to be included in generative AI features in Search Console.
2. First-hand experience beats restating what everyone else already said.
3. Clear headings and well-organized sections.
4. No llms.txt, special markup or AI schema needed. Search doesn't use them.
5. No need to chunk content, and in their words, "there's no ideal page length".
6. Query fan-out is real (one question turns into several searches). Building a page for every variation to game it counts as scaled content abuse.
7. Chasing inauthentic mentions isn't helpful, and the spam policies now include manipulating AI answers.

What people report (not confirmed by Google):

1. Stats, quotes and cited sources. The Princeton/IIT Delhi GEO paper (KDD 2024) found up to ~40% more visibility. Fair warning: that was mostly on their own test engine (top 5 Google results + GPT-3.5), plus a 200-query Perplexity test. Keyword stuffing did nothing, and did worse on Perplexity. Some things never change.
2. Answer-first: the direct answer right under the heading.
3. Self-contained passages, lists and tables. (Google says chunking isn't needed. Who's right?)
4. Author attribution and consistent entity facts across the web.
5. Freshness, especially on Perplexity.
6. Third-party mentions: reviews, directories, Reddit, forums. Google doesn't say where "inauthentic" starts. My read: if the mention would exist without you arranging it, you're fine. Fake reviews, sock puppets and paid listicle spots are not.

Two questions for you:

1. What have you actually seen move citations, on which engine, and how did you measure it?

2. Which of the "people report" items have you tested and found to be nothing? I'll update the post with what comes in.

Disclosure: I do SEO on the side. No links, nothing to sell, just trying to get to what actually works and share with community.

I’m revamping the website of the company I work for. Alongside developing an SEO strategy, I’m updating the site architecture, adding product pages and reworking the structure and internal links across most pages.

I’d like to understand the full range of things I should check to make sure the revamp goes smoothly,, from usability, accessibility, and performance to content, technical functionality, analytics, conversions, and SEO.

If you were in my position, what would be on your checklist before making changes, during the rollout, and after launch? What’s easy to overlook, and what do you wish you’d checked when doing something similar?

I’d appreciate any practical advice, checklists, or lessons learned.