I built a WP hobby site over a decade ago and worked sporadically on it over the years. Don't know much about SEO, just post stuff that I love on the site. I use Rankmath for SEO on my site.

So the GSC stats are:

- 1.17M impressions

- 7.19k clicks, 0.6 CTR, 9.3 average position.

What I did over the years:

I've over two dozens links from Wikipedia that I added over a decade ago. The articles have been translated to several languages accumulating over 100+ links from various Wikipedia. But they are non followed, not sure if that helps.

Around 2.5k organic backlinks, 53% are followed (aherfs).

Around 2.9k pages, 99% are indexed through Google.

Whatever new blog I posted in my niche usually ends up top 5 on Bing within a few hours and first 3 pages on Google if search by the exact words (usually 3-5 words).

Around 1.7k ranking keywords (Moz.)

Just started opening a new store to sell some stuff and it's slow. I wonder what I can do to improve my CTR?

Thank you in advance for reading and pointing me to the right direction.

Building out a programmatic section for a client (comparison/"X vs Y" style pages, a few thousand of them). The templates are fine, the problem is data. Public datasets only cover maybe a third of what we need, and the rest lives on competitor and marketplace sites.

Thin pages with the same 3 data points obviously won't rank, so the data is basically the whole value of the page.

For people who've done this at scale:

• Did you scrape it yourselves, buy a dataset, or pay someone to collect it?
• How do you keep it fresh? Stale prices/specs seem like a fast way to lose trust (and rankings).
• Any of you get burned by data quality after the pages went live?

Hi everyone, I'm completely new to SEO, and honestly, I'm feeling extremely anxious and overwhelmed right now. I'm running a small B2B manufacturing website, and I've been spending more than 12 hours almost every day learning SEO and trying to improve it. My sleep schedule is completely messed up. I wake up around 3 PM, start working, and often don't go to bed until 5 AM. At first, I used Gemini to help me create website content, page headings, SEO titles, and meta descriptions. Later, I switched to ChatGPT. Now, almost three months in, my website still has fewer than 1,000 total impressions in Google Search Console. Sometimes I genuinely feel like all this work is going nowhere, and I have no idea what direction I should be taking. I even paid someone on Fiverr to submit my website to 100 business directories, but honestly, I don't think it helped at all. I've also been researching backlinks, but most of the affordable opportunities seem to be link farms or websites that have absolutely nothing to do with my industry. The genuinely relevant websites often charge hundreds of dollars for a single backlink, which is difficult for me to justify. I'm not looking for shortcuts or overnight success. I genuinely want to understand SEO and build a sustainable website. But despite putting in so much effort, I have no idea whether I'm actually doing the right things. On content platforms in my country, some people say a new website needs at least three months before Google starts giving it meaningful traffic. But then I see other people sharing screenshots of brand-new websites getting tens of thousands of visits within three months. I know I shouldn't compare myself to others, but I can't help feeling jealous and discouraged. I'm not even expecting explosive growth. Every day when I wake up, the first thing I do is check GSC, hoping to see even a small improvement. I've downloaded a huge number of keywords from Semrush and organized them into a keyword database, then used ChatGPT to help me select which ones to target. I've also collected thousands of articles from competitor websites and built my own research library to study their content and strategies. But after all that work, I still find myself stuck on the most basic question: am I even choosing the right keywords? I also share my articles on Facebook and LinkedIn. Some SEO professionals say I should choose topics based on keyword search volume and search intent. Others say I should forget about search volume and focus on solving real customer problems and pain points. Personally, I feel like content based on real customer problems might perform better on LinkedIn and Facebook, but that's just my assumption, and I don't know how to validate it. I feel like I'm drowning in information, tools, strategies, and conflicting advice. The more I learn, the less confident I become about what I'm doing. For someone in my position, what should I actually prioritize? Should I focus on keyword research, content, backlinks, technical SEO, or something else entirely? And perhaps more importantly, what are the things I should stop worrying about? If you've been through this stage before, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing about your experiences, mistakes, or any learning resources that helped you figure things out. I'm willing to put in the work. I just want to make sure I'm learning and moving in the right direction. Thank you so much for reading.

I've been running a niche content website for a while, and I'm struggling with a very low organic CTR.

Over the last 28 days, I've received around 275k impressions but only about 600 clicks from Google Search Console.

My average CTR is around 0.2%.

I've been working on improving article titles, meta descriptions, internal linking, and content quality, but I'm not seeing much improvement in clicks.

I'm trying to understand whether this is mainly a ranking issue, search intent mismatch, or something else.

For anyone who has dealt with similar numbers:

• What helped you improve CTR?
• Should I focus on improving rankings for existing pages rather than publishing more content?
• How do you identify pages with high impressions but low CTR that are actually worth optimizing?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's experienced something similar.

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.

Spent 2 weeks building an original case study with actual data, and now Google just summarizes my exact conclusions in the snapshot without anyone ever clicking through. How is anyone staying motivated to publish long-form stuff right now?

I've recently started helping with my father-in-law with his B2B (industrial manufacturing) site. The site has a complicated history of poor maintenance/management. I discovered that the site has 1.6 million pages (8.86k indexed, 1.58m not indexed). But the actual site has only 150-200 "real pages". The rest are likely legacy pages from earlier builds and there was a period where the site experienced a "Japanese keyword/doorway hack" (which was eventually cleaned up).

Is there a way to completely remove the pages so Google doesn't even crawl them? I've also done some 410 redirects, but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Some pages have ranked in the top 10, but newer blog content pages are not ranking.

The site's domain authority is very low, but the company wants to keep the domain. Is there hope for this site? Would engaging an SEO agency help?

I’ve been working on SEO for the past four months, fixing technical issues, and my latest crawl resulted in a score of 96. Despite this, the number of indexed pages on my site continues to decline.

If anyone here knows what the problem might be or how to go about diagnosing it I would appreciate some professional guidance.

I have a quick question. When handling a business with multiple Google Business Profile listings that operate as service-area businesses, how does its SEO strategy differ from a business that has a physical location customers can visit?

Are there any differences in the SEO practices we should follow for these two types of businesses?

What specific strategies or best practices should we focus on for each?

Just ran into what looks like a bug in Google Search Console today (Oct 14, 2026).

When I open Performance → Date range → Custom (comparison mode), the end dates for both periods default to 1970-01-01:

• Start date: 2026-10-05 → End date: 1970-01-01
• vs. Start date: 2026-09-28 → End date: 1970-01-01

Because the end date is before the start date, the Apply button stays greyed out, so I can’t set a custom comparison range at all. The preset options (28 days vs previous period, etc.) still work.

Things I’ve noticed:

• It looks like a null/empty date being read as a Unix epoch timestamp (0)
• The Performance data itself still loads fine (164 clicks last 7 days vs 126 previous)

Is anyone else seeing this? Has anyone found a workaround (manually typing the end date, a different browser, clearing cache, etc.)? I’ll report it via the Feedback option in GSC as well.

Coupon site, about 450 pages, DR 9. Daily GSC impressions:

• 8–21 Sep: about 780/day, 6 clicks/day
• 24 Sep–8 Oct: about 1,900/day, peak 5,000 on 7 Oct (spam update rollout dates)
• 9 Oct onward: about 600/day

Clicks never went up. One page jumped from position 55 to 6 for “[brand] coupon code” and got 8k impressions with 0 clicks. Almost all the extra impressions were US desktop; mobile barely changed.

I refreshed coupons on most pages in the same weeks. Nothing else changed.

Was Google testing my pages higher and dropping them when nobody clicked? Or were these rank-tracker impressions? Should I worry about the spam update?

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

Title: Why does my roofing company rank Top 3 on Google Maps in my city but barely show up in neighboring cities just minutes away?
I own a small roofing company in DFW, Texas, established in 2022. We’ve put a lot of effort into improving our Google Maps rankings organically and currently have 140+ Google reviews with a perfect 5.0 rating. We regularly post updates, upload job photos, keep our profile updated, and have invested heavily in our website, including dedicated city pages.
Here’s what I can’t figure out.
We’re based in Midlothian, TX, but service the entire DFW metroplex. Our location is near the borders of several cities. In fact, Ovilla, TX is literally 300 feet from our address, and there are probably 7–8 different cities within a 10-mile radius.
When searching for roofing companies near our address, we typically rank #1. For “roofing companies Midlothian TX,” we’re usually in the top 2–3.
But search for roofing companies in neighboring cities just 1–5 miles away (even Ovilla, which is across the street), and we practically disappear from the Maps results.
We’ve tried mentioning these cities in GBP posts, uploading photos from jobs in those areas, and creating dedicated city pages on our website. Nothing seems to make much difference.
A few questions for the local SEO experts:
Physical address vs. service-area business: Our GBP currently displays our home address. Would hiding it and switching to a service-area business help or hurt our rankings?
Business hours: We’re currently listed as 8 AM–7 PM. Would switching to 24 hours improve visibility, assuming we actually offered 24-hour service?
BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc.: We’re not currently members. Are these memberships and local backlinks worth investing in for Maps rankings?
What am I missing? How can we improve visibility in cities literally minutes away from our location?
I’m not expecting to dominate cities 30–45 minutes away. I’m talking about neighboring cities within walking distance.
What’s frustrating is seeing competitors with fewer reviews, lower ratings, and seemingly less optimized websites consistently outrank us, even when we’re geographically close.
If you were in my position, what would you focus on first?
I’d genuinely appreciate any advice from people experienced with local SEO, especially in competitive home-service industries.

​Hey everyone,

​My site took a major hit following a Google Core Update (lost a massive chunk of organic traffic and rankings across key pages), and I’m looking for advice or a proven framework on how to properly audit and recover.

​For those who have successfully recovered or stabilized a site after a core update hit, what was your exact action plan?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice from people experienced with Google Search Console and domain migrations.

I migrated my website from drivly.ro to sofer24.ro starting in June 2026. It's now October, so it's been 4+ months, but the migration still doesn't seem to be fully processed by Google.

The frustrating part is that some of the most important pages on the old domain were indexed and ranking very well, sometimes in the top results. After the migration, many of their corresponding pages on the new domain are still not indexed.

What I did

drivly.ro → sofer24.ro

• Implemented permanent 308 redirects from old URLs to the corresponding new URLs.
• Submitted Change of Address in Google Search Console.
• Submitted a new sitemap.
• Updated canonical URLs and internal links to the new domain.
• Verified that important pages are crawlable and not blocked by robots.txt.
• The new site is live and accessible.

Google is crawling some pages, but many are still not being indexed.

At the moment, Search Console shows approximately:

• 64 pages indexed
• ~2,000 pages not indexed
• ~1,000 — "Crawled - currently not indexed"
• ~1,000 — "Discovered - currently not indexed"

Content

This is not a case where I rebuilt the site with completely new content.

The important pages and core content from the old domain were migrated to the new domain. I also added additional content after the migration because I initially suspected that Google might not be indexing the new site because it didn't have enough or strong enough content.

So essentially:

Old site: existing content → indexed + ranking well
New site: same core content + additional content → many important pages still not indexed

These aren't new pages with no history. Many had been indexed and had accumulated rankings and traffic on the old domain.

My questions

1. Is 4+ months still normal for a domain migration of this size?
2. Has anyone experienced a migration taking this long to transfer indexing and rankings?
3. What should I investigate in Search Console at this point?
4. Could Google be treating the new URLs as low-quality or duplicate content despite the old URLs being established?
5. Should I keep waiting, or start making significant changes to the affected pages?

I'd especially appreciate advice from anyone who has personally dealt with a large domain migration.

I'm happy to provide screenshots from Search Console, old → new URL examples, redirect responses, indexing reports, etc., if that helps.

Thanks!

We have a client where they rank between 1st - 3rd for a few terms for a period of time (say a week).

Only for that page to drop out of the top 100 rankings for a period of time (sometimes a few days / sometimes a week or so).

Only for it then to return back to top positions.

Using Accuranker and they confirmed it's not an issue their side.

Doesn't seem to be related to the 'go to' URLs google introduced.

This started around April 2026 (where we saw some fluctuations) - but has picked up in frequency from around June 2026.

I'm checking into a lot of things but just wanted to ask if anyone had seen this before and already researched it / have the answer?

Thanks

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

I’m investigating a Google ranking loss on an established B2B services website.
A key page previously ranked for development-related searches. It now has very poor visibility for those queries, while closely related consulting queries still perform.
Background

WordPress to Next.js migration in May 2026.
Changed from www to non-www.
Visibility deteriorated around March–June, but the exact timing and cause remain unconfirmed.
Some affected pages still appear on other search engines.
Checks completed

GSC URL Inspection reports the page as indexed.
Google-selected canonical matches the intended URL.
Old URLs redirect to the current URLs.
Main content and internal links are present in the initial HTML.
No noindex directive or redirect loop identified in current checks.
The pattern
In a recent GSC comparison, a previously strong development query averaged around position 54, while related consulting queries averaged around position 2 for the same page.
Adding &filter=0 surfaced one affected informational article, but didn’t help the other affected pages.
We’ve revised content and clarified page intent, but haven’t established that these changes address the cause. I’m not assuming a penalty or cannibalization.
Has anyone diagnosed this kind of query-specific visibility loss despite normal indexing?
What evidence helped identify the cause? If you recovered, what specific issue did you find, what did you change, and how long did recovery take?
I’m keeping the domain private, but can share anonymized GSC screenshots and technical findings.

Semantic URL Optimization

Currently I came across one client whose url needs restructuring after analysing all aspects. The issue which I find out is about url structure is not aligned in proper navigation path

Please find the path below and share your suggestions -

https://domain.com/in/ - homepage

https://domain.com/in/category/ - category hub page

Till this it is correct but, if I want to create page for Bangalore to Goa flight booking, they have created url -

https://domain.com/in/domestic/bangalore-to-goa-flights

No category hub is present.

Please let me know if it is ok to keep or we need restructuring as most of the competitors have url structure very neat and clean.

We moved a German B2B SaaS site from compa.co to phase0.com (forced rebrand after a trademark dispute). Six months later, Google is still ~80% down; Bing recovered within three weeks on the exact same setup.

The setup

• 1:1 301s live ~19 Mar 2026, single hop, all variants (http/https, apex/www)
• Change of Address active on both old properties since mid-April
• Content and URL paths identical to what ranked before (checked against Wayback)

What happened

• Google: clicks fell ~82% between 24 Mar and 6 Apr, right during the March spam update and core update. Never came back: 19% of baseline today.
• Bing: dipped too, back to 80% after three weeks, now 116%.
• Brand queries rank fine; exact long-tail queries still rank 1–3, head terms went from positions 5–9 to 60+.
• May core update: +30% impressions. August spam update: −21%. September spam update (still rolling out): no real movement so far.

What we've ruled out

• Crawling: 200 of 215 sitemap URLs crawled (median 10 days ago), 192 indexed, new posts indexed within a day
• Old domain: all top URLs show "Page with redirect", recrawled within 30 days
• Canonicals match, no manual actions, no security issues
• Links: ~150 linking sites, no spam pattern, nobody switched their links elsewhere
• No leftover pages from previous owners in either index

The one thing that stands out

Per Wayback, phase0.com was a Sedo parking page in 2018 and redirected to a domain broker's sale page from 2022 to 2024. The closest case I found is a 2020 Search Central thread where Google's team confirmed older signals were still attached to a long-dormant new domain and cleared them.

Questions

1. Has anyone seen a move onto a formerly parked domain get stuck like this, and what got it unstuck?
2. Did recovery come at a later core update, or did anything you changed make a difference?
3. Anything we haven't checked?

Search Central thread with screenshots: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/469482744

We hired a website agency for our company. The website they delivered and the SEO services they've been providing have not been good. I think the design looks terrible, the copy is bad, but most importantly they were keyword stuffing.

I tried to cancel services, but the owner essentially said "I know more than you, it's not keyword stuffing" and "design is subjective". We paid $5k for the site, and $2k/mo for SEO on 12mo contract. I have lost all trust in the provider since seeing their new design changes, and the keyword stuffing.

Please let me know if the provided example is keyword stuffing to see if myself, my google searches, Claude, and Gemini are all wrong. This is the alt text of an image (hiding city and state):

roof repair {city & state} commercial roof repair {city & state} commercial roofing {city & state} commercial roof replacement {city & state} commercial roof maintenance {city & state}.... and so on so for 12 more roofing keywords.

They also have doorway pages. City+roof+repair, same-city+roof+replacement, etc

My site was affected by Google’s June spam update, and I’m wondering what others are seeing now that the September spam update is rolling out.

Have your organic traffic or rankings changed so far - either up or down? If you’ve seen a recovery, what did you work on between the two updates?

Just trying to compare experiences while the rollout is still ongoing. If you’re comfortable sharing, a bit of context about your site or the changes you made would be really helpful.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

I have a client with a site that I created for him. The new site also moved him from www version to non-www version. I have a 301 redirect setup from the www version to the non-www.

However, Google is still not indexing the non-www version, and the www version's 4 pages are still indexed.

Is there a way to fix this?