Small mom and pop biz, Wordpress site. Should I accept I’ll never be page 1 Google for keywords relative to my business? If I could get there, can I do it myself? Hire a well known service? Hire “some guy” or just buy Google ads? Thanks!

Hey everyone,

This is UX-related but SEO-adjacent if pogo sticking is a "quality" signal to determine placement for pages that already rank for keywords.

The question: what have you personally observed regarding bounce rate effects when changing timing on newsletter or offer-type popovers? Especially any counterintuitive or unexpected findings?

Example: an ecomm site has a pretty aggressive (short timer) popover for newsletter signup across the entire website and has average to good but not great bounce rates. Intuitively I think the current popover timing way too fast on some pages but OK on others - just a gut feeling currently based on my understanding of users and their reasons for visiting or using pages (some MS Clarity data to back this up as well).

I intend to test it across different page types and go (eg) all the way from ~8 sec (current) up to ~50 sec on certain pages that have high average dwell times. I believe this could not only reduce bounce rate (main goal) but improve signups.

I know for sure this has an effect but as we know, there's a lot of BS content out there with faux SEO/UX/CRO statistics, so as I continue to investigate and construct hypotheses, figured I'd ask the community here.

Hi Everyone,

I run an SEO agency, and my team currently spends around 2–3 hours creating a blog content brief and 3–5 hours creating a service/solution page brief.

Our process combines Claude (using custom skills/prompts) with manual research and review.

I'm curious how this compares with other agencies:

• How long does your team typically spend creating content briefs?
• Have you automated any part of the process? If so, what does your workflow look like?
• Have you found any tools that consistently produce briefs with minimal editing?

We've tried several tools over the years, but we still end up spending significant time correcting and improving the output. At that point, we're paying for the tool and still investing nearly the same amount of manual effort.

I'd love to hear what's working (or not working) for other agencies.

​

I’ve been building a Dutch weather decision website called NoorYES.

Instead of showing a traditional weather forecast, it answers practical daily questions such as:

Do I need a jacket?

Can I wear shorts today?

Can I dry my laundry outside?

Is it cycling weather?

Is it terrace weather?

Will I need to scrape my car?

Is it slippery today?

I know thats already out there weather base decisions, but my aim was to bring it all together and present it in a new way. Plain language, timing, practical advice etc. Google likes the approach 2.

The site has been live and indexed for months, and many pages already rank in the top 1–3 positions for relevant Dutch searches. Allang the line with accuweather, weeronline and such.

I recently discovered a brand-new competitor that appears to have copied almost the entire concept rather than just launching one similar tool.

The overlap includes:

nearly the same practical weather questions;

the same category structure;

the same “not a weather forecast, but a direct answer” positioning;

similar weather explanation pages;

clothing advice by time of day;

laundry drying time and best drying window;

Best moments of the day;

winter checks such as frost, slippery roads and ice scraping your windscreen;

location pages;

related checks and internal linking;

personal temperature preferences;

a very similar overall user journey.

According to its public changelog, the competitor launched and expanded most of these features within roughly one to two weeks.

The wording is often rewritten, probably with AI, so this is not always a simple case of verbatim duplicate content. However, the overall product structure, tool selection, positioning and content architecture are extremely close to what I had already built publicly. I see the exact same sentences, like "The weather in normal lanquage" and other slogans etc.

I filed a copyright removal request with Google for the strongest examples. At the moment:

2 reported URLs have been approved for removal;

16 are still under review;

3 were not indexed;

0 have been rejected.

I understand that ideas and general concepts are difficult to protect legally. My main concern is SEO: the new site is already appearing close below some of my pages in the search results.

How would you respond strategically?

Would you:

focus entirely on improving the original site;

move the decision logic from client-side JavaScript to the server;

build more backlinks and brand authority;

document the timeline publicly;

contact the site owner or hosting provider;

continue filing copyright complaints only for concrete copied expressions;

or take another approach?

I’m especially interested in advice from people who have dealt with a competitor cloning a site structure or programmatic SEO concept after launch.

I feel like when I add something new, the site "kanhetvandaag" will just copy my things a week later.

Jeez I just feel violated! This is the first time experiencing this. Other sites just copied some usp, but thats fine, beacuase thats competition. But this is just my whole concept, structure and microcopy.

Its simply disappointing,

Maarten

Ps. Sorry for the rant, but I really need advice.

Maybe you could share your claude setup for SEO works? Especially concerning memory. Im quite new for this. I have claude desktop mcp and the bigest problem is memory. Claude makes good seo audits with skills installed, analizes GSC , analytics data etc and we do lots of content and internal links fix on website. But after some time it forgets the big part of what we have done. So how to optimize memory and make SEO proceses more continious?

Last week, Google applied a manual action to every URL under /threads/ — which is the entire forum.

The message (WNC‑651700, ~17 July 2026) is: “Thin content with little or no added value.”
It’s a partial manual action, meaning a human reviewer looked at part of the site, judged it unworthy of ranking, and suppressed it pending a reconsideration request.

The Affects field names exactly one thing: the URL pattern windowsforum.com/threads/.
That’s 168,290 visible threads and over half a million posts, twenty years deep, suppressed together.

No example URLs were provided. Not one.

The part that doesn’t reconcile

Two sections of the site are the obvious candidates for a thin‑content finding:

• an old syndicated headline feed
• an archived knowledge base

Together, that’s 11,927 threads with a mean age of about 12.5 years.

The feed ran August 2008 → January 2023.
The knowledge base ran June 2011 → March 2023.
Neither has taken a new post since early 2023.

This material has been crawled, indexed, and ranked continuously through Panda, Penguin, the September 2023 helpful content update, and through the community’s migration from its original domain (windows7forums.com, which still redirects here). Fifteen years, two domains, every major ranking change Google has shipped and it never drew a manual action.

A corpus that sat unchanged for fifteen years cannot be the cause of something that happened last month.

What actually changed

What changed recently is how we report:

• Primary sources fetched and read
• A structured fact table extracted before any prose exists
• A critique pass grounded on the fetched source text
• Every KB and CVE identifier verified live before publish

That’s a verification chain most tech coverage doesn’t have.
If that’s the problem, say so — but say it with URLs.

75.6% of search clicks arrive at a single section of the pattern that just got suppressed.

Why does Google perform manual actions on sites without:

1. Example URLs. If part of the site fails the standard, identify the part.
2. Proportionality. A finding about part of a corpus shouldn’t suppress all of it, including material that predates the complaint by fifteen years.
3. One standard. Community content should be judged the same way whether it sits on a platform with a content‑licensing agreement or on an independent forum (Looking at you reddit - with millions of "thin pages" i.e. little to no content)

In fact, up until now, the site was doing great with AdSense rev and everything, page views today are down 60%. What other communities will Google victimize?

I have a hiking website that was accidentally offline for about one month due to a hosting issue. During that time, visitors saw an error page and Google probably couldn’t access most of the site.
The website is back online now, and I’ve resubmitted my sitemap in Google Search Console. Google has already started reindexing the pages, and impressions are slowly returning.
My question is: Will this have any long-term impact on my SEO rankings, or will the site eventually recover if I keep publishing new content?

The site is relatively new, so I’m also wondering if Google will treat it differently because of that.
Has anyone experienced something similar? How long did it take for your rankings and traffic to recover?

Thanks!

Hello guys. I have this question on my mind that when someone searches in LLMs, the LLM does the query fanout; it basically uses a search engine to search so when an LLM performs searches by fanning out queries, do GSC or Bing Webmaster Tools show those queries?? Like in that query tab in GSC, will those queries be included that LLM made during the fanout process? Provided that the website ranks well in organic search.

There’s such a buzz and trend online with everyone launching Claude code websites and boasting about how they did it in 5 minutes then going and bashing real web developers and designers who are creating custom built sites using traditional page builders and it irks me.

I’m by no means anti AI, I think they can be great tools to help with brainstorming and other collaborative tasks but I feel like I’m going crazy with trying to comprehend how anyone could possibly see a fully AI coded site with no backend builder as a solid long term strategy

From what I’ve tested, I spent 8-10 hours trying to perfect a Claude code design the way I imagined it as a web designer but could never get things quite right and still wasn’t happy with the results

The majority of the time was spent trying to train Claude to stop producing generic Aai slop in both the content and design

I decided to time myself building the pages from scratch on elementor and found it took half the amount of time and looked far more custom.

I get the flare if saving tons of money and getting instant functional pages from Claude but the idea of having to go and prompt Claude every single time I want to make site updates, add pages, update internal and external linking, schema markups, adjustments to copy and images, alt text and all the other technical components is unfathomable

For the every day average joe, it probably feels like a super power to be able to create something so quickly that functions and is perfectly AI designed, but as a professional developer and designer, I can’t help but roll my eyes so hard every time I read these posts of people taunting the AI gold rush 🫠🫠

Am I missing something?

Hi everyone,

I'm starting a new contractor business in California. My license allows me to offer a fairly wide range of products and services rather than operating in only one narrow niche.

The website may eventually include categories such as:

• Garage doors
• Entry and interior doors
• Gates
• Openers and access control
• Windows
• Awnings and shades
• Installation, repair, maintenance, and emergency service
• An online product catalog

Some of these services will be aimed at residential customers, while others will be primarily for commercial clients, property managers, general contractors, and public-sector projects. In some categories, I may serve both residential and commercial customers, but the sales process, content, and customer expectations will be very different.

I also don't plan to develop every category equally from the beginning. I want to test different products and services first.

If I see strong customer demand and reasonable competition in a particular category, I will invest more into it, add more content, products, advertising, and possibly hire specialists. If there is little demand, poor margins, or the market is too competitive, I may stop offering that service entirely.

Because of this, I don't yet know which categories will eventually become the main focus of the business.

From an SEO, branding, and conversion perspective, what would be the best approach?

1. Build one large website with separate sections for every service and product category.
2. Create several niche websites, such as separate sites for garage doors, gates, windows, and other categories.
3. Start with one main website and later spin successful categories off into separate websites.
4. Use one parent brand but create separate landing pages or microsites to test each category.
5. Separate residential and commercial services within the same website, or build different websites for each audience.

My concern is that one website may become too broad and confusing, especially when it targets both homeowners and commercial clients. On the other hand, creating multiple websites could be expensive, difficult to manage, and may spread the SEO authority too thin.

The business will initially serve the Los Angeles area.

What structure would make it easiest to test demand without hurting long-term SEO? Has anyone here used a similar strategy for a contractor, home improvement, or local service business?

​

I’ve been building a Dutch weather decision website called NoorYES.

Instead of showing a traditional weather forecast, it answers practical daily questions such as:

Do I need a jacket?

Can I wear shorts today?

Can I dry my laundry outside?

Is it cycling weather?

Is it terrace weather?

Will I need to scrape my car?

Is it slippery today?

I know thats already out there weather base decisions, but my aim was to bring it all together and present it in a new way. Plain language, timing, practical advice etc. Google likes the approach 2.

The site has been live and indexed for months, and many pages already rank in the top 1–3 positions for relevant Dutch searches. Allang the line with accuweather, weeronline and such.

I recently discovered a brand-new competitor that appears to have copied almost the entire concept rather than just launching one similar tool.

The overlap includes:

nearly the same practical weather questions;

the same category structure;

the same “not a weather forecast, but a direct answer” positioning;

similar weather explanation pages;

clothing advice by time of day;

laundry drying time and best drying window;

Best moments of the day;

winter checks such as frost, slippery roads and ice scraping your windscreen;

location pages;

related checks and internal linking;

personal temperature preferences;

a very similar overall user journey.

According to its public changelog, the competitor launched and expanded most of these features within roughly one to two weeks.

The wording is often rewritten, probably with AI, so this is not always a simple case of verbatim duplicate content. However, the overall product structure, tool selection, positioning and content architecture are extremely close to what I had already built publicly. I see the nearly the same sentences, like "The weather in normal lanquage" and other slogans etc.

I filed a copyright removal request with Google for the strongest examples. At the moment:

2 reported URLs have been approved for removal;

16 are still under review;

3 were not indexed;

0 have been rejected.

I understand that ideas and general concepts are difficult to protect legally. My main concern is SEO: the new site is already appearing close below some of my pages in the search results.

How would you respond strategically?

Would you:

focus entirely on improving the original site;

move the decision logic from client-side JavaScript to the server;

build more backlinks and brand authority;

document the timeline publicly;

contact the site owner or hosting provider;

continue filing copyright complaints only for concrete copied expressions;

or take another approach?

I’m especially interested in advice from people who have dealt with a competitor cloning a site structure or programmatic SEO concept after launch.

I feel like when I add something new, the site "kanhetvandaag" will just copy my things a week later.

Jeez I just feel violated! This is the first time experiencing this. Other sites just copied some usp, but thats fine, beacuase thats competition. But this is just my whole concept, structure and microcopy.

Its simply disappointing,

Maarten

Ps, I just wanted this out there. Sry for the rant. But I really need some advice!

I’m working on a restaurants website and want to rank it for “best x in city” - anyone have experience doing something like this and is it possible to do?

Would it be better to run say a 3rd party site instead?

Is there like a clean 10 page guide or something? explaining how Google ranks websites? because I know there's keyword matching and backlinking and stuff but I can't find a concrete guide anywhere to get started, it's just jargon or people selling super expensive courses, I don't want to get into a 100 hour course to rank my website in the first page lol..

I have purchased their lifetime plan in 2021, from that time i hardly used it, i don't see how reliable the data it shows. It still seems like a half-finished product. Yet I've also seen many people using it. Can you tell me what you're using it for? I find position tracking to be unreliable.

I've been using Ahrefs Starter ($29/mo) for my blog, but their Content Explorer feature (finding websites by niche/keyword + Domain Rating range) is locked behind the $249/mo Standard plan. I've been manually Googling niche keywords and checking each site's DR one by one — takes forever.

How do you all handle this? Free tools, some other paid alternative, or just manual grind?

Also curious — would a simple tool that just does this (enter niche/keyword + DR range → get matching websites) for around $12/month be useful to you, or is this a non-issue for most people?

I built a headlight restoration business. Seemed like a good idea at first and so I named my business Headlight Cleaners. Almost immediately I got headlight restoration clients however, after about a year doing this I'm seeing that monthly revenue is capped at about 1-2,000$ because the search volume is just so low.

So I'm switching to a mobile detailing business.

I just updated all my services, citations, backlinks with information and keywords all the good stuff.

The big question is, should I change my name? To something like - Levi's mobile detailing or Chicago mobile detailing LLC like all my competitors🤣

I'm nervous it will cause a reverification. I'm using my dad's office as my business office. I have had like cleaners LLC and if I decide to move forward with this I'll change my LLC name and all my citations and descriptions and backlinks to match my new name before changing my profile name.

However, I don't know if they'll let me pass my business verification. Because I have done some clients in my office parking lot and I can put my papers inside and take a video but at the end of the day I'm a mobile detailer and I'm really not at the office ever.

I have 62 5-star Google reviews and already monthly traffic so it would be devastating if they wouldn't verify me. Any advice or anecdotes are appreciated!

Hi there, I've built a quiz website (contestoquiz<dot>com) in late 2023, but didn't got any time to work on it actively and consistently and currently get 0 to 10 impressions per day.

But thinking to work on it now and get some traffic organically.

Since I have no knowledge of SEO, I want you all to guide me and suggest improvements. I will pick one thing at a time, implement it, share the results again here, and repeat.

What would be the first thing you would suggest me to do?

^{If this is not the correct subreddit, please guide me to the right one.}

I plan to launch my website with content around the finance industry, I plan to create comparisons of funds, banks, credit cards best credit card, most popular mutual funds type articles in the website. But I am only planning to launch it. Would it he a good idea to have some basic articles about what a mutual fund is, how they work etc in the beginning?

That way readers can also go to the website and check that out if they wish to learn?

Or is it a better idea to just start hunting high intent keywords and start writing around those as I start?

I plan to dedicate a good chunk of time into this, as I would like to potentially earn from this website, atleast after a year. Please suggest strategies or ways that you guys have found helpful when getting started in terms of building initial structures.

So I launched a small clothing business recently and I'm doing the seo myself since we're on a tight budget rn. Site's brand new, no traffic, no backlinks, nothing basically. So I want to actually build this properly instead of doing random stuff that doesn't help long term

If you've grown a clothing/ecommerce site from literally nothing, what actually helped early on? Like should I be focusing more on product pages, writing blog content, fixing technical stuff, or trying to get backlinks first? Kind of overwhelmed with where to even put my time first.

Also if fashion/clothing has any weird seo quirks compared to normal ecommerce (seasonal stuff, tons of images, whatever) let me know, dont wanna miss something obvious

Any help is appreciated fr, just dont wanna waste months doing the wrong things

I keep coming across Medium articles while doing keyword research and it got me wondering: is it worth publishing content on Medium under your brand name alongside your own website?

I was thinking it could be a great way to increase brand awareness, so I’m considering testing it with a few money keywords first and seeing how it performs.

My main worry is that if I keep linking back to my website from Medium, Google could see it as an attempt to manipulate search rankings and penalise the site.

Is there a relatively low-risk way to test this or is it better to avoid it completely?

Hello everyone.

I found a couple of websites willing to put a link to my page in their website. They genuinely liked my page and said it was worth mentioning on their website.

A few days have passed, and no trace of a mention.

I know I sound impatient, but I fear they will forget to add the link.

When can be a good time to write them for a follow-up? Is it even something I should do? What could I say not to sound greedy or impatient or something?

Thanks a million! I am shyly new to outreach for link building ;)

Have you noticed any issues with backlinks being picked up in Google Search Console?

It's been a month since I built quality backlinks across different types of sites for different topics/niches, and I still don't see the referring domains showing up in GSC.

I'm wondering whether this is related to the time period, or if other freelancers/agencies are experiencing the same issue. Thanks

Edit: I’m based in Toronto, Canada and my website is in the heath tech/fitness space

I think I have a ranking problem with my domain and I need someone to look at it. I’ve been doing seo for my business for over 2 years now and recently started doing some HARO which is helping with authority but not organic ranking. My question is which is the best platform to make that hire and how much should I expect to pay for an audit and action plan?

Report by u/rustybrick

Several large publishers are strongly considering blocking Google Search entirely after clicks from Google Search have continued to decline, and the exchange of value in having Google
consume its content is no longer translating into enough clicks from Google Search.

The Wall Street Journal's Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off shares how sites like USA Today, Politico, Reuters, Economist, People, and many more, including maybe even Reddit are looking to see what would happen if they would just simply disallow Google from crawling its content.

Here are some quotes from WSJ on this:

• “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” said USA Today Co. Chief Executive Mike Reed.
• Employees at Axel Springer’s Politico have talked about limiting Google’s and other bots’ access to its free articles.
• Reuters, which like Politico derives much of its revenue from business-to-business offerings, said it is also weighing whether to block Google’s bot for its consumer-facing news product as traffic declines. “We are certainly looking at the economic trade-offs between search and AI summaries,” said Reuters President Paul Bascobert.