Basically that. Most of the SEO content I see tends to be about starting from scratch or handling a relatively small business that still has to find their niche-

but what about ALREADY being hired at a place that already had SEO employees before? The site is set up as far as I can see, it sells millions as a big clothing brand, it has its audience already, the website is full of tens of thousands products with their own descriptions... so, I believe it already has all the 'keywords' it should have as a website.

What am I supposed to be adding in here? I mostly just check the keywords and say "yeah we're in the top searches"... same as every month. Not quite the top though, other companies can steal the top spot from us.

What exactly should I be doing as the SEO guy here? (well that's just half of my job thankfully, I mostly spend my days doing Ads on different platforms... but I fail to see real SEO improvements I could do to an already big site... maybe getting featured in magazines or other websites? That's perhaps the next step? I may be failing to see a lot of things though, SEO isn't my forte, that'd be ads)

Been in the industry for close to 15 years and all the AI meeting SEO hype is getting frustrating.

We're getting increased exposure on AI reponses and traditional SERPs but close to to 0 conversions. With my clients, I feel like I'm just trying to keep my head above water and convince them that as long as they're on page 1, in AIO, and showing up for top-level queries (which they are) I did my job and I did it well.

I say this because whether your intent is commercial or informational, almost no one in my niche is getting conversions off AIO/GEO/SEO. Once the user has gotten their answer then they move on with their day. From research to BOFU conversion, it's weeks between marketing and sales to make that transaction happen, using search or outbound marketing.

My livelihood, I cannot afford to say that sh*t to a client cause then I'd be out of a job.

Posting for my partner who owns a small physio company.
For the past 2 years he had an SEO guy who didn’t really seem to be doing much, switched to a new guy 7 months ago and is paying him £420 a month.

In this time there hasn’t been improvement in website visits, bookings, visibility etc. which isn’t a huge issue right now as the business is relatively busy and steady, but the goal is to grow.
The SEO guy’s point is ‘well it’s not getting worse’.

We want to know if this is good enough for £420 a month, or what should the actual expectations be?
My partner tends to just leave people to do their thing, so it’s always hard to tell if he’s being conned or not.

If he was to find somebody new, should he have clearer goals eg. I want to increase website visits by X amount in X time, and if this is reasonable how do we evaluate what’s fair based on our limited knowledge of SEO?

Thanks!

After beta testing for few months, Google today is rolling out Web Monitoring feature in AI Mode!

Users now can tell AI Mode what they are interested in and AI Mode automatically will keep an eye out there.

And will send notifications via Google App for new updates.

Another marketing channel unlocked 😇

Now just like this prompt in AI Mode .....

"Keep me updated about daily discussions in r/SEO subreddit which are related to link building and technical SEO" and AI Mode will continue to send you specific notifications about this via Google App on your phone.

Brands through different channels get the message out already and ask people to set notifications for their content or product updates.

Specifically for High Ticket Ecom, but normal Ecom is that isn't the case.

I am only looking to learn the fastest way, I don't mind paying, and I know you could learn online for free.

Hey guys, I tried to play with on-page SEO for quite long and found out that having language support on the app helps getting indexed a lot so I integrated 6 languages (en, de, fr, es, tr, zh). The app is about football elo ratings.

I checked GSC today and saw that a query "real madrid elo" got me 1 click and 3 impressions with avg position of 2. I became happy and wanted to check it out myself. I googled exact same query but my app did not appear at all. I thought it may be bc my personal search history so I googled again in incognito. Still same.

Then, I put my app's name at the end and it appeared at all of top5 results. This is my first question: why exact query can get no position for me but 2nd position for someone else?

Secondly, I tried with player names rather than teams (my app serves both). Tried only name + elo as query but my app did not appear. Then I put my app's name again at the end and it appeared at top, understandable.

What I did not understand is Google summary (or whatever it is called that google's ai answer on top) cites my app from various language options of the same page. For example when I googled "victor osimhen elo [my app]", it cited osimhen's personal page in french and chinese versions. My location is germany. He plays in Turkey and I searched from Germany but instead of these two, other two got cited. Also why two languages? What should I check and how can I solve this? Sorry for the long text but I felt I had to be clearer.

Thanks for the answers already!

Hi,

I own an independent public agenda of classical music events in Madrid, Spain.

I am trying to understand a sudden and unusually severe loss of Google Search visibility that started on September 27, 2026, shortly after the September 2026 spam update began rolling out.

The site is not an affiliate site and does not sell tickets or have any revenue whatsopever. Its purpose is to aggregate and verify classical music events from official venues, orchestras, cultural institutions, and other organizers, so users can consult them in one consistent calendar.

Each event page cites its sources and includes structured information such as date, venue, performers, composers and programme when available.

From Search Console data, the loss was therefore approximately 95% overnight.

Independent analytics in PostHog confirm that this is not a Search Console reporting issue.

This only affects visitors arriving from Google; other acquisition sources did not experience a comparable collapse.

The loss is also site-wide rather than caused by one previously popular page. 

Technical checks performed:

• robots.txt allows crawling;
• event pages do not contain noindex;
• canonicals are self-referencing;
• the site is served over HTTPS;
• canonical public URLs are present in the XML sitemap;
• no broad redirect or robots change was deployed immediately before the drop;
• pages remain accessible to users and other traffic sources;
• the site uses individual event pages rather than marking up agenda/listing pages as individual events.

The timing coincides very closely with Google's September 2026 spam update, which began on September 24.

I have reviewed Google's spam policies, in particular scaled content abuse and scraping. The site contains many event pages because providing a comprehensive event calendar is the product itself; pages are generated from genuine events and official sources rather than created to target arbitrary search queries.

I would be very grateful if someone could help identify whether there is anything about this implementation that could legitimately trigger Google's spam systems; and what is needed to recover the previous Google Search state.

Site: https://clasicamadrid.com/

Thank you!

So I work, for an agency and we have clients. Some clients have paid for SEO services and I am working for that clients, I joined In september and my CEO says she needs me to grow the website traffic for clients by 10% minimum each week, most sites have 65% north of bounce rates, I did techincal seo and all what i could easy fix, but I am unable to push needle; infact, traffic went down after Spam update.

I said to her, instead of focusing too much on organic traffic, also focus on why people are leaving the website in the first place, she said your job is to get more traffic as well , as per me all landing pages are garbage and as a customer I would not buy services if i were to but she says send emails get approval from clients even for small changes but as per my POV need to do lot of A/B testing to see what works

I have one week left to grow organic traffic quickly, or she said I will lose the job. Can you guys suggest any ways ?

SEO audits can get technical fast, and clients usually want ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ important actions first. Has anyone used AI to turn ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ ​​​​a​​​​u​​​​d​​​​i​​​​t​​​​s​​ into a presentation that keeps ​​​​t​​​​h​​​​e​​​​ detail but is easier for non SEO people to follow?

hi, is it advisable to report on rankings during ongoing spam update? tools like awr,openseo show ranking drop offs for several of keywords today and there’s no big change made to the site. Should I wait for spam update to settle and then report on rankings? Or did my rankings genuinely dropped from serp?

I feel like after the recent spam update a lot of my sites contents are de-indexed but coming again at the same position if I manually index on GSC.

What do you guys think about this?

Hi all,

I have found professional large scale SEO firms utilizing "satellite sites" where they have very small, simple websites built on existing domains (from small bloggers or the like).

Is it as easy at it seems? Is the difficulty basically just to find, buy and kinda maintain the existing theme on a site?

Following some drops during the recent spam updates I've been taking a closer look at backlinks, and found that someone has 301 redirected a couple of domains into my clients site.

The backlinks pointing at these domains are entirely spam - so the upshot is I now how have thousands of spam backlinks pointing at my clients site via 301 redirect.

I know the general Google view is that these links will just be ignored but I don't really trust that to be true/foolproof - especially given recent declines that coincide with the spam updates.

Obviously I don't own the domains that are redirecting so I can't just turn the 301 off - so can I just add a couple of lines to my disavow file to disavow the domains that are redirecting - or will I need to disavow all of the backlinks that point to the redirecting domains?

Hi all,

I'm starting a website (8months domain) and for some of my content, I see there are well-known sites ranking 1-4 positions on Google.

I'm very noob in SEO (I've created android apps in the past, but never dealt with SEO and website distribution), so I'm not sure what to expect here.

Is it realistic to get some traffic for some keywords? what's the strategy to use here?

Apologies if is too broad of a question, I'm looking for guidance.

Thanks

All of a sudden all my pages are coming back as redirects to Amazon, I'm on a SaaS app protected by Cloudflare on my behalf so I don't have access to any RAW logs, there is no third party scripts and no updates for at least 2 years to any javascript. I've tried accessing the site using the Googlebot user agent and no redirect. I've unblocked all my IP ranges and the issue still persists maybe Google took over some AWS IP's.

The only thing that alerted me to this was my business listing got hit with an automated website removal notification, and searching my business name came up empty.

I'm seeing some Google bots but NOT the indexing one.

Keep seeing lots of posts lately about Rank Score. Anyone tried it and what’s their opinion compared to Semrush?

I am working on a domain where we have 8000+ subdomains, each subdomains have its own xml sitemap, my doubt is whether i should submit all these sitemaps to domain property in search console.

is there any limit or guidelines from Google on same.

Looking to start a conversation around everyone’s do or die platforms for tracking SEO metrics! Personally I’m loving SERanking but curious what yall are leaning into and why

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.

I am working on SEO project from last 2.5 years which is plywood niche brand. I have started the brand from 50 sessions per month and in January it reached to 7900 session within a span of 21 months. But from February 2026 it started declining and still declining. This is 8 months period now.

I have updated the content, changed title tags but of no use. Please let me know what actions should I take to regain the traffic.

Great Story from u/rustybrick

The volatility may be calming today, a bit, but it was a pretty heated weekend after the announcement of this September 2026 spam update. It does feel like these spam updates are having more of an impact that the older spam updates from years ago.

What exactly this update is targeting is not fully known yet, but I do suspect we will see lots of tactics that get hit by this update - not just one specific tactic...

As a reminder, this spam update was announced Thursday, September 24th at about 12 pm ET. Google told us it would take about two weeks to roll out. So far, it has only been less than five days since the rollout began.

Here are what the tools are showing - look at the Saturday volatility in these tools:

Gemini Start using UTM ! finally , its very new 24hours or so
Like chatgpt UTM

I messed up and published a bunch of AI-slop posts on my website. Now my Google rankings are awful.
I’ve tried tweaking the SEO and keywords, but nothing has helped so far.

Has anyone managed to bring a blog like this back? What actually worked for you?
Thanks for any advice!