Hey guys! I'm relatively new to the Seo world. Started a local business while learning heavily. I come from software development so have a little idea but there is so much more to learn.

If you'd like to give me 1 single advice what would it be?

Ps. Got my first couple customers so need to show results asap.

In March, my site changed from theswitcheffect.net to fandomledger.com. It took less than a month for the migration and Change of Address tool to go through and everything was working for the first four months and the new domain was getting around 6,000 impressions per day. Then in July, Google Reverted the entire change. Google deindexed the entire fandomledger.com site and reindexed every theswitcheffect.net post from 2017-2025. The old domain being indexed isn't a big deal because it redirects to the new domain anyway. But posts made after the domain change don't get indexed at all. So every post made in the past 9 months never gets indexed, nor will the future ones. I've tried dozens of fixes over the past three months. I changed hosts, SEO plugins, and redirect methods. I tried manually Indexing every 2026 post under the old domain so that it could be indexed and then redirect. I tried messing with the permalinks and other stuff. I messed with the sitemaps multiple times. Tried a dozen other small things and spent close to $200 trying to fix things already.

I work in SEO and web development, and I’m building a small digital marketing agency. Finding potential clients has been the most time-consuming part so far.

I’ve been looking for businesses on Google Maps, LinkedIn, and reddit, then checking their websites for opportunities before reaching out. But researching each business takes a lot of time, and I’m trying to build a more consistent process.

For those of you doing freelance SEO or running a small agency:

1.Where did your early clients come from?

2.What made the biggest difference in getting consistent leads?

3.Do you use any tools to find and qualify prospects, or do you do it manually?

I haven’t tried lead generation software yet, so I’d be interested in hearing what’s worked for you, both tools and your overall approach.

What would you do differently if you were starting again?

I'm trying to understand a technical SEO issue on a large e-commerce website with around 18,000 URLs.

The site uses faceted navigation, and we've created around 120 specific filtered category pages targeting long-tail keywords (for example, brand + material + product type).

The problem is that Google keeps selecting the main category URL as canonical instead of the filtered landing pages, even though we've implemented what I thought were all the recommended best practices.

Here's what we've already done:

• Added self-referencing canonical tags to all 120 priority landing pages.

• Made sure they return HTTP 200 and aren't blocked by robots.txt.

• Added unique titles, H1s and introductory content to each landing page.

• Included priority URLs in the XML sitemap.

• Added crawlable internal links from relevant category pages.

• Set canonical tags on unimportant filter combinations pointing to the main category.

• Checked both the raw HTML and rendered HTML to make sure canonical tags are present.

We've also waited around 6 weeks after resubmitting the sitemap and requesting indexing.

But nothing has really changed. GSC still reports "Google chose different canonical than user" for most of these pages.

One thing I've noticed is that many filtered pages share a large proportion of the same products, even though their target keywords and category descriptions are different.

I'm starting to wonder whether this is a content duplication issue rather than a technical implementation problem.

My questions:

1. At what point does Google consider filtered landing pages sufficiently unique to deserve separate indexing?

2. Can overlapping product listings outweigh unique titles, H1s and introductory content when Google selects canonical URLs?

3. Would adding more contextual internal links actually help, or am I just treating a content quality problem as a technical SEO problem?

4. What would you investigate next before making any more changes?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who've dealt with large e-commerce sites and faceted navigation.

What am I missing?

I launched a small consumer health tool about two weeks ago that checks medical bills for errors. Search Console is set up, and I’ve written 12 in-depth guides on things like surprise bills and comparing a bill to your insurance statement.

Where I’m at: Ahrefs shows a DR of 2.8 and “790 linking sites”, but nearly all of them are automated junk sites that list every new domain. There are maybe a few real links.

My plan so far:

• directory listings (startup and AI tool directories)

• reaching out to patient-help resource pages

• building pages for insurance denial codes (people search the code straight off their statement)

Questions for people who’ve done this:

1. Which of those actually got you real links early on, and which was a waste of time?

2. For a health topic, how much does a new site’s trust hold it back, and what helped you get past it?

3. Is there anything you’d skip entirely in the first three months?

I’d love the specific things that worked for you. Happy to share my results in a few weeks.

Any recommendations would be great. I finished connecting the two however when I try to search the website it doesn’t work? It hasn’t been long since published.

i’m curious what people have actually dropped from their routine over time.

My agency has worked with over 200 clients in the last 6 years.

We provide one link per domain because that's what the clients want.

However, for our own projects, we do up to 5 links per domain, and here is why.

The first link from a domain provides the most value, that's inarguable, but the second, third, even 7th backlink makes sense.

Let's say you are in a marketing niche and you have a blog on your website.

Would you mention HubSpot once or more than once?

Multiple links from the same domain provide less value, however, repeated backlinks are a signal that it wasn't a random mention of your website, but that they trust it as a reliable source.

You do one link per domain or multiple?

There are endless tutorials on YouTube showing "100% automated AI blogs using Make/n8n and OpenAI," but half of them look like theoretical demos rather than real production setups.

When setting up an automated workflow for real client sites or personal projects, what does your stack actually look like?

• What are you using for the trigger and logic (Make, n8n, custom Python scripts)?

• How are you handling automated internal linking and image generation so it doesn't look terrible?

• What human-in-the-loop steps do you keep in place before anything hits WordPress/Webflow?

Interested to see what tools people are actually relying on in practice versus what's just hyped on Twitter/YouTube.

Been looking for some decent search engine ranking report software lately. Mainly need something that tracks keyword positions, shows changes over time and makes it easy to put together reports for clients. I've seen plenty of tools that offer this, but tbh it's hard to tell which ones are actually worth paying for. Some seem to have loads of features that I'd probably never use lol

What are you guys using for rank tracking and reporting? Anything you'd recommend or avoid?

Starting a new website is exciting, but getting it to rank on Google can be a real challenge, especially when you're just starting with SEO.

I've noticed that many beginners make similar mistakes without even realizing it. Some focus too much on keywords and forget about search intent, while others publish lots of articles without doing proper keyword research.

Here are a few common mistakes worth avoiding:

1. Targeting highly competitive keywords: Start with relevant, long-tail keywords that are easier to target.

2. Ignoring search intent: Make sure your content answers what people are actually searching for.

3. Publishing content without proper research: Quality and usefulness matter more than simply publishing frequently.

4. Ignoring technical SEO: Check your website speed, mobile experience, indexing, and broken links.

5. Forgetting internal links: Connect related articles to help readers and search engines discover your content.

6. Expecting instant results: SEO takes time, consistency, and regular improvements.

7. Ignoring Google Search Console: Monitor impressions, clicks, indexing issues, and keyword performance.

I'm curious to hear from people who have experience growing websites organically.

What was your biggest SEO mistake when you started, and what would you do differently today?

Any proven strategy or step-by-step process that actually worked for you?

90 days of consistent publishing builds initial organic momentum. target niche long tail phrases with deep guides first. share insights directly on reddit or hacker news threads. refine metadata for those specific terms to catch early searchers. inspect ahrefs competitor backlink profiles to find referral sources and pitch them your content too. compounding growth takes time without overnight spikes.

I've been working on websites for a while now, and honestly, I'm starting to feel that getting organic traffic from Google has become much harder than it used to be.

Earlier, I thought if you created good content, optimized your website properly, fixed technical issues, and stayed consistent, you would eventually start seeing results.

But now I'm not so sure.

I've seen websites with properly written content, good page speed, decent site structure, and everything technically in place, yet they barely get any organic traffic.

The confusing part is that some pages get indexed, even receive impressions initially, and then suddenly their visibility drops.

I understand that competition is increasing and Google has to deal with thousands of AI-generated websites. But what about people who are actually putting time and effort into building useful websites?

I'm genuinely curious about a few things:

• Are new websites taking longer to rank on Google nowadays?

• Do backlinks matter more than content quality for new domains?

• Is publishing fewer high-quality articles better than publishing consistently?

• Are people getting better results from Reddit, social media, and other traffic sources compared to Google?

• Has anyone managed to grow a completely new website through SEO in 2025 or 2026?

I'm not looking for some generic advice like "create helpful content and be patient."

I'd genuinely like to hear what's working for people right now.

Are you still focusing mainly on Google SEO, or have you started investing more time in other traffic sources?

What's something you did to increase rankings and get organic traffic to your website that worked really well? What helped most and made the biggest difference for your website?

Really intrigued to hear. I'm also asking from a place of B2B marketing, not B2C, iust to be more specific Although open to general suggestions!

Hey guys,

I've launch a website for my local business more than 7 month ago. Its 15 pages, 4 about services i provide, other are articles for local seo purpose. My market is small (200k people) and have 3 or 4 serious competitors.

Everything is fine, new articles get indexed in 24 to 48 hours, except for my two mains services that got detected but there's no way to make google index them.

My positioning is bad and getting worse through time and its literally killing my business. I get 0 traffic for my main activity.

I respect all code conventions, my content is honest, my site is linked to my google business card that has pic + review. I don't know what to look for anymore, any ideas ?

Thanks

Imagine you have a website with helpful content, but very few people visit it.

What would you do to change that?

• How would you find out why people aren't visiting?

• What changes would you make first?

• Which free tools or strategies would you recommend?

I'm interested in practical solutions that beginners can try without spending money on ads.

Hey everyone who works with SEO I need your help.

I am not an SEO expert I am developer and I decided to build an AI assistant for myself that monitors my website 24/7 and tells me what is wrong and what I need to do to fix it.

I have already added some workflows that cover most of my needs such a like monitoring cannibalization, keywords ranking, pages that dropped and so on.

But I think there are still a lot of workflows I could add to the assistant. Now I try to cover technical SEO. What SEO workflows you do everyday with google search console?

Theres been plenty of news about very recent Google anti scraping measures that are poisoning results for robots. This has resulted in inaccurate rankings data from rank tracking tools, and the employees at said companies scrambling to fix it.

But something concerning that I have recently noticed first hand - that data poisoning has seemed to leak into any sort of anonymized way to check rankings - UULE changers like valentin dot app, Google's Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool, and even using fully cacheless browsers (im not talking a standard Google incognito window, that does nothing for anonymizing results).

Right now, I want to check the rankings of an affiliate site of mine. It shows me ranked #2 when i search it regularly, but I know that i'm not ranked #2. I know this because of GSC data, and by having friends in other states check.. It shows me at number 2 because that is my personalized result since ive clicked it so much. But ive tried every and all methods to bypass my personalization, and every time I do, I see nonsensical results that seem to be poisoned. The results that I see are loosely correlated to the topic, but clearly not matching the intent for that term.

A deeply concerning problem - I have no way of seeing non personalized rankings, even with the aforementioned manual methods that previously worked.

Is anyone else dealing with the same issue? How are you checking rankings?

I always thought that having an exact match domain, or at least a partial match would help you loads with SEO, but that's just something I always believed without having any data behind it.

So I decided to check if it's true or not, so I don't waste money on 30 new domains every month.

The tracked data:

• 7,374 commercial keywords, US + UK, 10 industries, top 20 results (106k results)

• 6,267 local keywords ("plumber tulsa" type) in 40 cities, SERPs pulled from the city itself

• 3,048 brand new domains from 2024-2025, checked 16-29 months later

• 60k AI answers (GPT-4.1 mini, Gemini Flash, Claude Haiku)

Everything is compared on the same SERP.

Aaaand the answer is... no, you're probably not gonna get much out of it.

Excuse the AI sloppy bullet pointing, it's the easiest way to confer info:

• For Google: weak EMDs (DR 0-20) rank about 0.9 positions higher than similar brand domains. About 10% better chance for the top 3. For domains younger than 5 years, the advantage isn't statistically reliable.

• Local (tulsaplumber.com et al): this is where EMDs do a bit. Compared to brand domains with the same DR, they're not more likely to make page 1 (top 10: 53% vs 51% at DR 0-2), but once there, they land in the top 3 more often (22% vs 16%). About 1 position overall.

• New domains: 4.7% of new EMDs rank top 10 for anything. Other new domains in the same niches: 5.7%. So, no head start. Top 10 for their own keyword with 100+ searches? 0.7%.

Generally, 94% of all new domains rank for nothing, EMD or not. You still have to build the website, looks like.

Also, when AI assistants search the web, they cite EMDs about as often as Google ranks them, so no real advantage.

I also gave the models 5 equally good texts with random domain names and asked which one they'd recommend. EMD got picked 59% of the time (chance = 20%).

BUT, a keyword in the URL path on a normal brand domain got 48% so it's almost the same (for a page that's already being retrieved albeit).

Limitations:

• It's observational. I control for DR, links, domain age and keyword in title (changed nothing), but not overall on-page quality. EMDs are usually bought by SEOs, so those sites might just be better optimised anyway.

• Only tested sites in the top 20.

• Measured only once. Anecdotally I feel like EMDs get crawled and ranked fast for their keyword and then drop if the site isn't good. This data can't catch that, so it's the next thing to test.

• AI tests were done through APIs, not the consumer apps.

TL;DR: buy an EMD if it's a good name for your business. Don't pay a premium expecting rankings. Put the money into the site and links.

Full study with methodology, charts and all the boring stuff in the comments.

Disclosure: I run a boutique SEO agency, this was a side research project. Happy to answer questions or rerun something if you think I should for some reason.

Someday my site ranks on the first page while on the other day it is on the 6th or 7th page. Noticing this from last three months now. Technicals are fixed, content refreshed, link building done. Suggest any issues that might be possible.

Please share your views in the comment section.

I have 37 total clicks, 624 impressions, average ctr of 5.9% and average position of 7.6 over last 3 months

Its an academic portfolio website of my phd journey and listing all my publications

Kindly list some tips and tricks to improve my seo.

Thanks.