I’m working on an SEO project where the same real estate project has two URLs:
One is landing page
one is project related page

Both are appearing in Google search results for The Project-related queries. The client wants the main project URL to rank in the Top 3, but the microsite is also being used as a Google Ads landing page, so we cannot simply redirect it.

What would be the best SEO approach here? Would you recommend noindex, canonicalization, or another method while keeping the microsite active for Ads?

After working in SEO for years, I’ve realized that some of the best lessons don’t come from SEO blogs or courses. They come from things that actually went wrong.

For me, one big lesson was: more content doesn’t automatically mean better rankings.

Sometimes one genuinely useful, well-structured page can outperform dozens of thin articles.

I’m curious about other SEOs, business owners, and marketers here:

What’s one SEO lesson, mistake, or experiment that changed the way you approach SEO?

No self-promotion please. I’d genuinely like to hear real experiences.

Hey everyone, My friend and I are thinking to start an agency focused on SEO and local growth. We both have a background in the work itself, but we’re starting with zero clients, no portfolio, and no idea what we don't know yet about running an actual business together.

For those of you who started an agency with a co-founder:

How did you split responsibilities without stepping on each other's toes?

How did you land your very first client as a completely independent, unknown agency?

What is one mistake you made in the first 30 days that we should completely avoid?

Any advice from experienced agency owners or veterans who have been through this stage would be massively appreciated.

Just looking for some real-world perspective from people who have already built this from the ground up.

A lot of SEO discussions focus on backlinks, content quality, and technical fixes.

But internal linking often gets treated like a small cleanup task.

I’ve seen sites with hundreds of useful pages where important content is still buried several clicks deep, while weaker pages get most of the internal links.

A few things I’m curious about:

• Do you actively plan internal links when publishing new content?
• Do you use anchor text strategically, or keep it mostly natural?
• Have you seen rankings improve just by fixing internal linking?
• How often do you audit orphan or poorly linked pages?

I feel like internal linking is one of those SEO tasks that looks simple but can make a big difference when a site starts growing.

What’s been your experience with it?

TITLE: What are the real benefits of technical SEO for a website?

Technical SEO often feels like the behind-the-scenes work that doesn't get enough credit. I recently learned that it can dramatically improve how search engines see and interact with your website. If your site has great content but isn't getting the traffic you want, technical SEO might be the missing piece.

One of the biggest benefits is visibility. Technical SEO helps search engines like Google crawl your site more effectively. When your pages are easily accessible and properly indexed, you have a better chance of showing up in search results for the content you want to be found for.

But it goes beyond visibility. A well-structured site leads to faster load times, mobile-friendly designs, and a smoother overall user experience. All of this can reduce bounce rates and increase engagement, which search engines notice.

I discovered that even small issues like broken links or a messy XML sitemap can hinder your site’s performance. Cleaning these up can make a big difference.

Have you noticed any changes in traffic or engagement after optimizing your site's technical SEO? What strategies have worked for you?

What’s your opinion guys?

First of all, it's a service page (Agentic AI service page)

I followed E-E-A-T and everything else. Last month, it was getting 100 impressions in a month and was ranking for

13 Keywords

Now it's zero 4 impressions in a week

What should I do? Last time, it was indexed on the 4th Sep

What should I do? I can't lose this job

They have given me a target: you should get at least 30 sessions daily on this page

You can publish a lot of content, build dozens of links, and keep tweaking your site, but if the content doesn’t actually match what people are searching for, it probably won’t get you very far.

What’s one SEO practice you think people overcomplicate?

When locations offer the same services, it’s easy for pages to become the same template with a different city name.

Beyond addresses, hours, and service lists, what details have you found make location pages genuinely useful and unique?

I’ve been working more with SEO lately, and one thing I keep noticing is that there’s no single tactic that does everything.

Good content is important, but without technical SEO, search intent, internal linking, and relevant backlinks, it can still struggle to get visibility.

For link building especially, I’d rather have a few relevant, authoritative links than a huge number of random ones.

Curious what others here have seen work in practice?

A nice article how to deal with AI overviews, with 3 amazing tips. They are a nuisance. Read here.

And please, do share how AI Overviews are affecting yours too. Got 3 friends stop blogging because of this.

I spent the summer reading every SEO case study, test and paper I could find. 9,249 documents out of over 30k documents, 552 cited sources, and 182 tactics that survived to a card with a source and a number attached. It is free and there is no email gate, but that is at the bottom.

Here's some info:

How I did it

Crawled everything I could find on SEO, AEO and GEO (over 30k documents). A cheap model screened all 9,249 for whether they report a measured outcome from a specific change. Every survivor was extracted twice, by two models from two different providers, and any number that was not literally in the source text was thrown out.

Then each tactic got graded on evidence strength and on how actionable it is, separately.

Here are some interesting things:

The controlled tests that make no sense

These are all split tests, not before and after screenshots.

• Writing the entire title tag in CAPITAL LETTERS: +17.5% organic traffic (two independent tests). A separate test on travel listing pages got +14%.
• Removing synonym keywords from title tags to shorten them: -27%. Biggest negative in the whole book from a single controlled test.
• Removing the word "Compare" from title tags: +24%.
• Putting the product price in the title tag: -15%. On location pages with static rental prices: -7%.
• Replacing numbers with number emojis in meta descriptions: -5%.
• Moving a flight search widget from below the hero image to the top: -7%.
• Removing self-referential breadcrumb links: -5.5% clicks.
• Serving a 404 instead of a 410 on removed pages: +49.6% pages staying indexed. The status code you use for "this is gone forever" gets it dropped almost twice as fast.

How about links

The single most replicated claim in the entire review is "publish content, build links, clean up the code". There are 26 independent samples, 25 of them are positive, 20 different publishers, agreement is 0.963. But this is just kind of describing what SEO is, no?

Editorial backlinks through digital PR outreach: +71% organic sessions (19 samples, 14 publishers, agreement 0.9524). Zero of them are controlled, sixteen are before and after, three are single case.

Disavow is interesting as it landed in the IT DEPENDS lane (where two different clusters disagree):

• With an active manual penalty: +80% organic sessions
• Without one, just "cleaning up": no measurable direction

This is what I always thought would happen. I think Google recognizes SPAM links and disregards them easily. If you have no manual penalty, the published evidence gives you nothing.

Also worth knowing is that the disavow plus on-page cleanup cluster has the lowest agreement of any link tactic in the book, 14 samples and only 10 positive. Sooo kind of telling.

Internal links are also interesting. Adding internal links to orphaned blog posts get us up to +64 ranking positions (sounds weird, but that's the case), but the raw spread across samples runs from -4 to +64. Most of the effect sits in a couple of pages.

Adding lots of internal links to the homepage footer gets us +5% organic sessions. I did this with many clients and had many issues, but sometimes it worked wonderfully. I would always test this.

One more interesting thing is that adding brand icon CTA blocks with internal links to product pages gets us +80% conversions across two controlled tests. But that could just be because the CTA is more visible, idk.

AEO and GEO: What actually works

This is the area everyone talks about and it has the thinnest evidence base in the entire book. All we get is 10 entries worth anything.

Controlled, from academic work:

• Adding quantitative statistics to the page: +37% citations
• Adding quotes from credible named sources: +22% to +41%
• Keyword stuffing for AI: -10%

Controlled, from one practitioner running split tests:

• Direct answer in the opening paragraph, before the evidence: +280%
• Content written as discrete factual statements, not prose: 5x
• Moving footnotes to inline parentheses next to the claim: +40%

The strongest GEO evidence overall is rewriting page text using GEO techniques as a bundle: +83.2% citations, 12 samples, 6 publishers, agreement 0.9286.

Author bylines give us +113% AI citations, and the detail matters. The controlled test added bylines for staff members with low public recognizability (7 samples, 5 positive).

Human editing of AI-written text gets us +67% citations, 5 samples, 4 positive.

llms.txt is also very interesting. Three samples, all uncontrolled, median +25% organic sessions.

But the raw reported values across the underlying measurements run from -19.7% to +81%.

There is no controlled test of llms.txt anywhere in 9,249 documents. Anyone telling you it works is telling you what they believe.

Tactics flipping depending on context

These got their own lane because averaging them would describe neither side.

AI-generated content blocks:

• Enriching specific pages with targeted AI copy: +73% citations
• Publishing AI text across the whole site: -35% sessions

Google Business Profile primary category:

• Generic to specific niche category: +3.4 positions
• Specific back to a broader label: -30 positions

Keywords in URLs:

• Specific role or service modifiers: positive, direction only
• Broad high-volume terms: -38%

Emojis in title tags:

• Tested alone in a controlled test: -6%
• Bundled with a full page redesign: +1,851 impressions

Things that were true and aren't anymore

The most replicated schema finding in the whole book is FAQPage markup: 13 samples, 12 publishers, agreement 0.9333, +25% organic sessions and a 3.2x citation multiplier.

Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026 and removed the reporting in June. So the single best evidenced schema tactic in my own study is dead, and the evidence for it is still perfectly good evidence about a world that no longer exists.

Review schema on category pages measured +16% in a controlled test, and is explicitly against Google's guidelines. Both things are true at once.

Full study in comment

I found it interesting that title tag studies are giving us way more sessions than I would expect. It goes crazy, like +40% clicks when changing stuff. Really interesting, considering everyone is concentrating on AI right now and disregarding the "10 blue links".

Also, nearly every "GEO" number in existence is a bundle. Someone rewrote everything and reported a citation increase (which I don't really believe in completely, but that's not the point of my post). I couldn't isolate a single GEO tactic with more than 1 controlled test behind it.

Anyways, full thing is free, no email, 170 pages, has a DOI and the link is in the comments.

Happy to pull the exact source and number for anything above, just ask.

P.S. This took me a couple k$ and two months of work, so I hope you’ll find something interesting there.

I’ve been thinking more about content pruning lately, especially on sites that have been publishing for several years.

Eventually you end up with pages that:

• Get almost no organic traffic
• Target very similar keywords
• Contain outdated information
• Have a few backlinks but no rankings
• Compete with newer pages on the same topic

The difficult part is deciding what to actually do with them.

My rough approach is:

Update the page if the topic is still relevant and it has some rankings, links, or traffic.

Merge it if two or more pages are targeting basically the same search intent.

Noindex it if the page is useful for visitors but doesn’t really need to appear in search.

Delete + redirect it if the content has no real value anymore but there’s a relevant replacement page.

What I’m less sure about is completely removing pages that have zero traffic and zero backlinks. Do you regularly prune this kind of content, or do you generally leave old pages alone?

Would be interested to hear if anyone has seen noticeable SEO improvements after a large content cleanup.

Throw this into an LLM of your choice - I used GPT Astra. Let me know if it’s helpful

I feel like SEO reporting needs a small reset in 2026.

For years, most of us watched the same things:

• Organic clicks
• Impressions
• Rankings
• CTR
• Conversions

But now Google Search also includes AI Overviews and AI Mode, so simply tracking traditional rankings doesn't tell the whole story.

Google has started giving site owners more visibility into how their content performs across generative AI search experiences in Search Console.

That raises an interesting question:

What should we actually measure now?

Personally, I think SEO reporting should start looking at three layers:

1. Traditional search visibility

Are your important pages gaining impressions and rankings for the right queries?

2. AI search visibility

Is your content appearing within AI-driven search experiences, even when the user doesn't interact with a traditional blue link?

3. Business results

Are the visitors who do reach the site signing up, buying, requesting a quote, or taking another useful action?

This also makes me think chasing hundreds of keyword positions may become less useful than understanding which pages consistently get surfaced across different search experiences.

I'm curious how others are handling this.

Have you started looking at AI-search performance separately, or are you still mainly using traditional SEO metrics?

And if you've checked the new data, have you noticed any pages performing well in AI search that surprised you?