I am a beginner trying to learn SEO, AEO and GEO. There is so much material out there and it's overwhelming. Can someone give me a proper approach to learn these skills?

Thanks in advance :)

In early August, Google was testing requiring searchers to sign in to verify they are humans to continue to see search results. Now, Google is testing a similar feature without requiring you to sign in, but instead, Google is asking you to click a "Continue" button after a few seconds, after Google verifies your request.

My Google Business Profile (GMB) was suspended, and I believe this may have been triggered or influenced by repeated reports from a competitor. I have tried to recover the original profile, but unfortunately I have not been successful.

I also tried creating a new profile, but it does not appear in Google Search for any terms—not even when searching for the exact business name. This makes me wonder whether there may be some kind of restriction associated with my business, account, or other signals, although I cannot confirm that I am actually “blacklisted.”

At the same time, I decided to clean up my backlink profile because I had accumulated more than 800 toxic referring domains pointing to my website over the past few months. I previously used the Google Disavow Tool and saw very good results, so I decided to do it again.

Unfortunately, this time I may have made a mistake. I included some domains in the disavow file that contained old guest posts I had purchased through Fiverr. The links were from a different niche and were somewhat spammy, so I considered them toxic at the time, but I am now concerned that some of those links may have still been providing SEO value.

About two weeks after submitting the disavow file, I lost my #3 position on the first page for my main focus keyword. This has had a significant impact on my business.
What would you recommend doing at this point to recover my rankings as quickly and safely as possible? Is there anything I can do to reverse or mitigate the effects of the disavow, especially if I accidentally disavowed some links that were actually helping me?

I would really appreciate an expert opinion on whether the ranking drop could realistically be related to the disavow, or whether I should be looking for another cause. I am also interested in any legitimate tactics that could help me regain the first-page position faster, as the situation is having a direct impact on my business.

Hey gang, I'm a long-time SEO with a bit of a conundrum.

I'm working with a client that has a service-area business, and am at the stage where I'm beginning to build some local citations for them.

Because they're a home-based service-area business, they don't want to publish their address. Fine.

But how do I build NAP citations for a business that doesn't want their "A" to be public?

Do I just put the city name?

I manage a legitimate hidden-address service-area business in a midsized U.S. metro.

A local competitor provides a very similar service, but we are separate businesses with different names, phone numbers, websites, categories, and Google place records.

DataForSEO’s Google Maps results return the exact same latitude and longitude for both profiles, matching to six decimal places. A third hidden-address service-area business in the same market returns a different coordinate, so this does not appear to be a standard city or service-area center point.

Neither business is known to operate from the property connected to the shared coordinate. Both profiles were created around the same general period and were later converted to hidden-address service-area businesses. There may have been some historical address overlap, but that part is not confirmed.

I also ran 12 controlled local searches. The competitor appeared repeatedly, while my business was absent from the first 20 results in every test. I understand this does not prove that the coordinate is causing the visibility difference.

Google Business Profile Support gave me only a generic automated response, so I am trying to understand whether this pattern has happened to anyone else.

Questions:

1. Have you seen two separate service-area profiles receive the exact same coordinates?
2. Did it turn out to be a stale location anchor, duplicate or merge history, geocoding error, local filtering, or merely a third-party reporting artifact?
3. Was Google Support or a Product Expert able to correct it?
4. What evidence helped get the issue escalated?

I am intentionally withholding the business names, exact coordinates, city, Maps links, and support case number for privacy. I am not looking for ranking tricks or asking anyone to report the competitor. I am trying to determine whether the underlying location record may be wrong.

I manage a few local seo clients and fake google reviews are always one of those things where the advice sounds simple until you actually have to deal with one. Usually i start by checking whether the reviewer was an actual customer and documenting anything suspicious such as copied wording, unusual account activity or several reviews appearing at the same time. Then i report it and if needed go through the appeal process. However in majority of the cases it does nothing. I am curious how others handle this especially when google keeps the review up despite there being clear signs that its fake. Do you have a process you follow for clients? Have you ever engaged with any review removal services and had any success?

SEO Experts / Agency Owners – Need Direct Answers (Real Estate / Construction Finance Website)

Our company is into Construction Finance / Project Funding / Real Estate Funding. We help real estate builders and developers get loans by coordinating with banks.

I’ve understood the basics of SEO, but I still have a few doubts. Please give short and direct answers.

1. While writing a blog, how many internal links should I add to other related blogs? (Need just a number/range.)

2. What’s the easiest way to find high DA backlink opportunities for free?

How many backlinks are ideal for one blog?

Can I use one backlink website for multiple blog URLs?

How many backlinks should I build per week?

1. What’s the best way to increase my website’s Domain Authority (DA)?

2. Apart from Justdial and Sulekha, what are some free business directories worth listing on?

3. Where can I get genuine free Google Business Profile (GMB) reviews?

Please keep the answers short, practical, and beginner-friendly. Thanks!

Hi, I recently built a website and it's been more than 2 weeks but when I search for the name of my website (it's named Recordal), and it doesn't appear in Google search. For my keyword, Google shows 7 pages, but my website url doesn't appear in those 7 pages.

If I search for site:recordal.app, I can see a few pages are already indexed by Google.

Is there anything I am doing wrong?

I do social/content for a med spa (Med Spa Studios) and want to help them get found more in organic search too, not just social. It's a local business, one location, competing with a handful of other med spas nearby.

For local service businesses like this, what actually moves the needle most in your experience

• Google Business Profile optimization
• Local landing pages per service (Botox, facials, etc.)
• Reviews/citations
• Blog content targeting "near me" type searches

Trying to prioritize since I'm not a dedicated SEO person, just want to build good habits into what I'm already doing for them. Any local-SEO-specific gotchas for med spas/aesthetics businesses would be huge too.

Hello All Reddit Community Fellows,

As I told in Subject line, that I'm experienced in blogging, I have posted at my reddit wall 20 minutes ago but I don't know why reddit automated system delete my post, even there was no issue in that I simply ask that how other people are doing blogging in the age of AI and as I'm using google sheet to automate my blogging, I also alsk that other people are using this? simple

Apologies in advance this is quite a complicated one…

Due to rights reasons I’m eventually going to have a to change my website name as I only own the rights to it in 2 countries and one of them isn’t the US.

I can’t do this straight away as I’m in a legal battle and it will look like I’m abandoning my name

So my plan is to temporarily have 2 sites, my existing site and a new one to capture leads from social. I’ll need both of these live for about 6 months

For my new website, I’ve cloned my original, stripped it down to 7 core pages, re-written the copy, changed the page structure and added new imagery to try and avoid googles duplicate content issues and its a new domain name

But both websites are built around an individual private doctor so were in the YMYL niche

My question, If I later clone my original site and replace the new live international site with the original and 301 everything from the original site to the new international one (with the goal being that this is my only website) would that be ok even though the content and page structure of the international site is being rewritten (though it’s the same niche and authority)

Two things I keep reading everywhere and cannot verify. I would rather ask than repeat them.

1. "AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript." Every citation I follow ends at the same Vercel analysis from 17 December 2024. That is 20 months old, and the vendor sells server-side rendering. Has anyone measured this again since?

2. "AI crawlers give up after 1 to 5 seconds." OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity document their user agents and IP ranges, but no timeouts. Everything I find is blogs citing blogs. Does anyone have a primary source, or server log data showing real abandon behaviour?

If the honest answer is that nobody has re-tested it, that is useful to know too.

Hey everyone,

I’m building a coaching business around a competitive video game (Counter-Strike 2), where I help players improve through structured training, gameplay reviews and personal coaching.

I’m currently trying to improve the business side of things and I would love some advice from people who have experience with online businesses, marketing or SEO.

A few things I’m trying to understand:

• What are the best ways to improve SEO and get more organic traffic from Google?
• Are there any AI tools you would recommend for SEO research, content creation, marketing or finding opportunities?
• What strategies worked best for growing an online community/business?
• What are some tools or platforms you use to track competitors, keywords, trends or customer behaviour?
• What would you improve when looking at a website/offering like this?

I’m not looking for promotion, just honest advice from people who have experience building online businesses.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Hi as the title says I am working on a ecommerce website for my business. I struggling with SEO part as the devs are not very familiar with SEO. It being a website being built from scratch the we need to integrate the SEO part right from the beginning. Can you anyone give me a detailed checklist of what needs to be covered in SEO.

TIA

I'm sorry to bother you, knowledge tycoons. I'm a newcomer in Hong Kong who has just been exposed to SEO for a year. I really want to know what to do for SEO from zero to one million website traffic to get an order? This is a post for help. I want to be a professional person and find a better job.

No links in this post, per rule 2. Fetch the robots file on each domain yourself and grep for GPTBot if you want to verify any of it.

What I found today:

Flat Disallow for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, CCBot and Google-Extended:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok

No AI specific rules at all, everything falls through to the wildcard group:

• YouTube
• X (only Google-Extended is blocked)

LinkedIn is the interesting one for this sub. Googlebot gets a long explicit allow list. Every AI crawler gets a single line of refusal. So the exact page you optimised to rank is the page the answer engines were never allowed to read.

Two consequences I keep running into:

1. Traditional rankings and AI answer inclusion have completely decoupled for anything hosted on a walled platform. Ranking a client's LinkedIn presence does nothing for what ChatGPT says about them. The two channels no longer share a crawl.

2. The AI answer ends up quoting whatever is on open web instead. Conference bios, old agency pages, press releases, a directory listing nobody has updated since 2022. The stale open web page beats the maintained walled one, because it is the only one that can be read.

So the practical lever seems to be the opposite of what we normally do. Instead of optimising the profile, you make sure a crawlable page exists somewhere you control that actually states the current facts.

Anyone here already treating this as a separate workstream from SEO? Curious what you put on that page and where you host it, and whether you have seen it actually change what the assistants say.

Looks like Ireland is leading the charge here:

With these designations, the Commission will gain investigative powers to assess the functionalities behind these services and, where applicable, any related system. The Commission will be competent to supervise compliance with the DSA, in cooperation with Coimisiún na Meán for ChatGPT and Reddit, and the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) for Roblox. These entities serve as the Digital Services Coordinators respectively for Ireland and for the Netherlands, where the designated services are established.

ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that can engage with and respond to users' prompts and queries, including by searching the web. Hence, ChatGPT is a hybrid service that qualifies as an online search engine under the DSA.

Reddit is a discussion-based platform that enables users to create, share, and interact with content within topic-based communities. Roblox is an immersive gaming and creation platform that enables users to create, publish, and play games developed by other users. As these services enable users to disseminate third-party content to the public, they qualify as online platforms under the DSA

I am Korean and majored in chemical engineering, but I used computers as a hobby. After completing my military service in 1997, I created my first website and, using click-to-pay banners like the one on AdSense now, received checks for nearly a year—not a large sum of money, but still dollars. Due to family circumstances, I taught math and science to my children at a private tutoring center to cover their tuition, and they graduated with poor grades. Even while teaching children, I created a website, which had been my hobby, and built it using XE and GnuBoard, which can be considered Korean message boards, and managed to rank first on a major site while doing a side job.

When I felt that my passion for educating children had waned, I quit my 18-year career in education and changed jobs to other fields, but my experience was not accepted anywhere in Korea. In the meantime, an e-gaming company in the Philippines offered me a position in SEO, and I moved to the Philippines. At the time, I didn’t even know what SEO was doing. What I later found out was that the thing I was doing as a hobby in Korea was SEO.

At the end of 2019, I came to the Philippines and encountered WordPress for the first time, but the work of SEO, as commonly understood in terms of displaying the sites I knew, was not easy. At the beginning of 2020, the pandemic arrived, and while working from home, I studied SEO and by the end of 2021, my core keywords were able to appear at the top of the first page of Google’s site. There was a time when I earned more than ten thousand dollars a month in commissions, but because I had to support my parents in Korea, my savings were not sufficient, and in 2024, the Philippine government’s policy that foreigners are not allowed to work for e-gaming companies caused me to lose my job. Whether it was unfortunate or fortunate, before losing my job, I married my current Filipino wife and became a father to a child, but our circumstances became far from comfortable. I lost my job, but on my own, I tried every possible way to rank the keyword egaming, only to realize after a few months that this area can no longer be managed by individual effort, so I began studying AI in mid-2025. The profit from trying out and creating various things is zero. What may be in my future....What will our family’s future be....At fifty, with my two-year-old daughter and wife...Every single day is really a hard and exhausting day.....The SEO I wrote in the title is dead!! I didn’t write that title; it was something a YouTuber I subscribe to said. I’ll try looking for a job through SEO again yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but the language barrier (I’m not good at English...)...It’s hard to even find a job with this translation machine, LOL...Today, I just wanted to have a Blendedie and write it down here, just like my diary. I also created a Reddit account over a decade ago, but I don’t even remember that account, so I’m venting here with a new one. I hope everyone is happy.

My buddy asked me to build a new website for their mental health practice since the old one was a 2-page GoDaddy Airo site. The old site had a homepage and a services page, both very sparse. I mean less than a paragraph per service, and only three services listed.

I rebuilt the site using Astro. Every page is a static page. I expanded the site from 2 pages to 42 pages: the two original pages with expanded content, 7 new pages for the different conditions they treat, 5 new pages for the different services they offer, and a few miscellaneous pages like a privacy policy, a reviews page that pulls from Google reviews, and a booking page that links to their booking software. I then duplicated those pages in Spanish. Since they're static, they don't take much work. A lot of my buddy's patients are Spanish speakers, so the thought process was that I could target them with these pages.

Each Spanish page is a real translation at its own URL (e.g. /depression-treatment-[city] ↔ /es/depresion), titled "[Service] en Español en [City], [State] | [Clinic Name]" so it reads as local and in-language in search results. English/Spanish pairs are linked with hreflang, and each page canonicals to itself.

I'm no SEO expert, but I didn't want to break my friend's SEO. I'm not trying to improve it, just maintain what they had. According to GoDaddy's analytics, the old site gets around 1,000 visitors a month, while Google Search Console says they receive around 200-300 clicks. I'm not sure why the discrepancy is so large, but I suspect it's bots hitting the site directly, or people visiting the site directly vs. clicking a search result. He was very surprised when I told him 1,000 people were visiting the site a month. The vast majority of the GSC clicks are from people searching the name of the clinic directly, not finding them through "clinic near me" type searches. Either way, based on GSC there were only two indexed pages, and those have the exact same URLs on the new site, so no redirects needed.

I have not rolled out the site yet. Here is a list of changes. Please give me feedback with the goal of just not breaking their SEO.

• Existing homepage title was just the bare domain name. New one is "[Clinic Name] | Psychiatry & Therapy in [City], [State]"
• Existing services page title was just "Services". New one is "Psychiatry Services in [City], [State] | [Clinic Name]"
• Every page has a unique title with service + city, kept under 60 characters; descriptions under 160
• Canonical tags on every page (old site: none)
• hreflang tags linking each English/Spanish pair (old site: none)
• Plan on submitting a sitemap.xml. The old site never had one submitted
• Cumulative Layout Shift fixed to zero
• Images served as AVIF/WebP with JPEG fallback
• Clean robots.txt, sitemap, and internal linking between related conditions/services
• PageSpeed mobile: performance 98, accessibility 100, best practices 100
• PageSpeed desktop: performance 99, accessibility 100, best practices 100
• SEO score says 68 because I have a noindex/nofollow tag on it. I hosted it on a staging URL so my friend can review it. Before I switched it to noindex, the SEO score was 100

I am really concerned that I might break my friend's SEO. Is there anything on this list that's a red flag, or anything I'm missing before I flip the DNS?

Hi, what's up? So I'm building allpros.io My main problem is that I'm not getting traffic to the site, even though I'm doing everything by the book.

I'm creating blogs that match user intent, I'm doing internal linking on the site, and I'm bringing in backlinks.

My technical side is in great shape.

And I'm still not getting traffic. I'd love to understand what you think I should be doing, and what I should really be focusing on to get traffic flowing to the site.

I keep hearing different answers from different people some say backlinks, some say blogs, some told me to do YouTube. But I feel like none of these is the right answer, because most of it is already happening and I'm already doing it.

There's a core problem here that I'm trying to figure out.

Looking for a sanity check from people who've seen this pattern before. Not asking for a site review, no links — just the data and what I did.

The site - Gaming niche: launch-week guides, known-issues/fix pages, release countdowns. English + Traditional Chinese + Japanese versions of most pages (hreflang, static site on Cloudflare). - Domain went live Aug 6 (301 migration from an older domain). ~436 URLs. Near-zero backlinks, DR under 1.

GSC, daily (impressions / clicks / avg position)

Queries with impressions went 475 → 202. GA organic sessions from Google: ~200/day → 2-6/day since Aug 25, no bounce yet.

What still looks "normal" - URL Inspection on ~30 pages: all "Indexed", no manual actions, no security issues. - Bing: 326 of 446 URLs indexed in Bing WMT, Copilot citations actually went up after Aug 24. ChatGPT sends a handful of visits a day, unchanged. - Two other sites I run (different niches, same setup, same age range) didn't move at all.

What looks broken - Sitemap "last read" date frozen at Aug 27. New URLs submitted since then come back "URL is unknown to Google". - The residual impressions sit at position 19-32 — so it's not a few pages slipping, it's the whole site dropping out of page 1-2.

What I did right before the cliff (yes, I know) - Aug 23-24: published 102 content files in ~26 hours (had been doing 4-17/day). New map/tool pages, a new game cluster, and the Japanese versions. - Aug 24: changed sitemap hreflang from zh-CN to zh-Hant and added ja alternates across the site. - www and non-www were both live until Aug 29 (canonical pointed to non-www, but the top-impression URL in GSC was the www version). Added the 301 on Aug 29. - Timing overlaps the Aug 18-21 spam update tail, but the drop started as the update ended and accelerated after the batch.

Things I've already ruled out - Tracking bug: GSC, GA and a third-party rank tracker agree. - Manual action / hacked / robots / noindex: clean. - Server: static on Cloudflare, 200s, no crawl errors.

What I'm doing now - Stopped the volume: 2-4 pages/day max, fixed schedule. - Not touching hreflang/sitemap/templates again. - Inventorying thin pages (<600 words) for consolidation + 301 rather than adding more. - Slowly building real links (curator page, a couple of directories, one guest post in the works). No paid links.

Questions 1. Does "indexed but position 20-30 with 1% of previous impressions" read to you as a site-level quality reclassification, or as the new-domain honeymoon ending? How do you tell them apart in GSC? 2. Has anyone recovered from a drop tied to a one-day publishing burst on a young domain? What did the recovery curve look like and how long? 3. Would you consolidate/noindex the batch pages now, or leave them and let the crawl settle? 4. Is the hreflang change on the same day a red herring, or does re-clustering alternates plausibly suppress a whole site for weeks?

Happy to share more GSC screenshots (domain redacted) in comments if useful.

Our website operates as a proxy-buying service, so we have nearly 70,000 product links included in our sitemap. Could this have a negative impact? If so, how should I handle it?

I run a small service company and I'm getting a lot of spam calls is this inevitable or is this from bad SEO tactics?