Hi everyone, I am actively looking for a backlink exchange opportunity in the Business/Finance Niche (specifically Insurance).
The website should be spam-free and must post real and valuable content for their users.
Doing an audit and found robots.txt has Disallow: /_next/ (full block). Checked with JS disabled, and the page content is fully visible, so it looks like the site is SSR and the actual text/copy is fine either way.
But since /_next/ is blocked, GSC's Live Test shows JS, CSS, and images are all blocked too. Rendered screenshot in GSC looks broken (unstyled, icons huge, no layout).
Questions:
/_next/ actually hurt rankings, or is it more of a "looks bad in Google's render but doesn't matter for indexing" situation?/_next/image) actually stop those images from showing in Google Images, or does Google still index them some other way?/_next/ disallow entirely, or scope it down to something like blocking only /_next/static/chunks/ while allowing /_next/static/css/ and /_next/image?I spend most of my time working on SEO and organic growth for B2B companies, but I enjoy looking at websites from completely different industries.
Every business has blind spots, and sometimes an outside perspective is enough to uncover a few easy wins.
So I'm opening up a few free website audits.
What you'll get:
If you're an early-stage founder, solopreneur, SaaS builder, agency owner, or local business, drop your website below or send me a DM.
I will review the first 5 websites over the weekend.
Been seeing a lot of posts around advanced Local SEO strategies lately, so thought I'd share a recent win.
Honestly, I didn't do anything groundbreaking.
The business already had a Google Business Profile, but it was only partially optimised.
What I worked on:
That's pretty much it.
Results (Feb 2026 → Jun 2026):
One thing I've noticed is that many businesses (and even some SEOs) start thinking about backlinks, content clusters, or other advanced tactics before fully optimising the GBP itself.
In this case, simply executing the fundamentals properly made a noticeable difference
3 months ago, I joined an insurance broker company and got the task of ranking the homepage for business insurance, commercial insurance, and product pages like WC Insurance, PI Insurance, and D&O Insurance.
In these 3 months, I fixed technical SEO issues, removed 400+ dead blogs, fixed heavy cannibalisation (40+ blogs were competing with the WC product page), improved internal linking, updated product pages, refreshed pillar/supporting blogs, implemented schema, added FAQs based on sales calls, and even got a contextual backlink to the WC page.
Now I'm seeing new keywords like WC Insurance, WC Policy, Workmen Compensation Insurance getting picked up, but the product page is still stuck around Page 3. At the same time, the pillar blogs are ranking on Page 1-2 for their focus keywords.
The only thing I feel I'm missing is Digital PR/authority building. We're competing against brands like ICICI, HDFC ERGO, Tata AIG, etc., while our domain is only 5 years old.
Am I missing something here, or is this just what happens in the insurance niche? Would love to hear from people who've worked in highly competitive industries.
3 months ago, I joined an insurance broker company and got the task of ranking the homepage for business insurance, commercial insurance, and product pages like WC Insurance, PI Insurance, and D&O Insurance.
In these 3 months, I fixed technical SEO issues, removed 400+ dead blogs, fixed heavy cannibalisation (40+ blogs were competing with the WC product page), improved internal linking, updated product pages, refreshed pillar/supporting blogs, implemented schema, added FAQs based on sales calls, and even got a contextual backlink to the WC page.
Now I'm seeing new keywords like WC Insurance, WC Policy, Workmen Compensation Insurance getting picked up, but the product page is still stuck around Page 3. At the same time, the pillar blogs are ranking on Page 1-2 for their focus keywords.
The only thing I feel I'm missing is Digital PR/authority building. We're competing against brands like ICICI, HDFC ERGO, Tata AIG, etc., while our domain is only 5 years old.
Am I missing something here, or is this just what happens in the insurance niche? Would love to hear from people who've worked in highly competitive industries.
3 months ago, I joined an insurance broker company and got the task of ranking the homepage for business insurance, commercial insurance, and product pages like WC Insurance, PI Insurance, and D&O Insurance.
In these 3 months, I fixed technical SEO issues, removed 400+ dead blogs, fixed heavy cannibalisation (40+ blogs were competing with the WC product page), improved internal linking, updated product pages, refreshed pillar/supporting blogs, implemented schema, added FAQs based on sales calls, and even got a contextual backlink to the WC page.
Now I'm seeing new keywords like WC Insurance, WC Policy, Workmen Compensation Insurance getting picked up, but the product page is still stuck around Page 3. At the same time, the pillar blogs are ranking on Page 1-2 for their focus keywords.
The only thing I feel I'm missing is Digital PR/authority building. We're competing against brands like ICICI, HDFC ERGO, Tata AIG, etc., while our domain is only 5 years old.
Am I missing something here, or is this just what happens in the insurance niche? Would love to hear from people who've worked in highly competitive industries.
Suddenly, we got our first Local SEO project and are looking for the best tool to track performance and Grid Ranking across locations.
Suddenly, we got our first Local SEO project and are looking for the best tool to track performance and Grid Ranking across locations.
I saw that Gemini now supports a Google Business Profile (GBP) connector, and I understand the obvious use case: asking Gemini to summarise reviews or answer questions about your profile.
But beyond that, I want to know how it changes day-to-day local SEO workflows.
I saw that Gemini now supports a Google Business Profile (GBP) connector, and I understand the obvious use case: asking Gemini to summarise reviews or answer questions about your profile.
But beyond that, I want to know how it changes day-to-day local SEO workflows.
I've been thinking about this recently, and I wonder if a lot of us accidentally create our own ranking problems.
For the longest time, I assumed that if I found another keyword around one of my services, it deserved its own page. So I'd create another guide, another checklist, another "best practices" article, another FAQ... basically anything that looked like an opportunity.
Looking back, I think I was confusing more content with more topical authority.
What changed my mind was seeing pages from my own site constantly replace each other in the SERPs. One page would rank for a while, then another would take its place, and sometimes neither would perform consistently.
It made me wonder whether I'd created too many pages around essentially the same intent.
Since then, I've started treating every service as a topical cluster instead. I'll build one strong pillar page, add supporting content that answers genuinely different questions, connect everything with internal links, and then... stop.
Not forever, but until there's an actual gap worth filling.
The idea that changed my approach was this:
The solution isn't publishing less content. It's publishing more intentionally.
I still create supporting content. I just don't create a new page because I found another keyword variation.
Curious if anyone else has noticed something similar.
How do you decide when a topic is "covered enough" before moving on to the next cluster?
Most of the clients now want to show up on ChatGPT, Gemini, or other LLM platforms because of the shifting behaviour of people from traditional SERPs to get a direct answer to their problem.
Does shifting behaviour really impact in future?
I saw that Gemini now supports a Google Business Profile (GBP) connector, and I understand the obvious use case: asking Gemini to summarise reviews or answer questions about your profile.
But beyond that, I want to know how it changes day-to-day local SEO workflows.
Most of the clients now want to show up on ChatGPT, Gemini, or other LLM platforms because of the shifting behaviour of people from traditional SERPs to get a direct answer to their problem.
Does shifting behaviour really impact in future?
I saw that Gemini now supports a Google Business Profile (GBP) connector, and I understand the obvious use case: asking Gemini to summarise reviews or answer questions about your profile.
But beyond that, I want to know how it changes day-to-day local SEO workflows.
Need some help understanding this one. A colleague called me today because they're dealing with a pretty bad SEO issue. Around 1.5 months ago, their dev team moved the blog from the main domain to a subdomain. So it went from something like:
domain.com/blog/... → blog.domain.com/...
From what I know, they did the usual things:
But Google is still showing both the old URLs and the new subdomain URLs in search for a lot of pages. Then, after the recent Google update, traffic completely tanked. They were getting around 7M monthly organic visits, and now it's dropped hard. I was also told they received a manual action in Search Console, although I don't know the exact reason.
I kept asking whether the redirects were actually working, whether the old URLs were still returning 200, whether the canonicals were correct, whether there were any indexing issues, etc., but I still couldn't figure out what would cause Google to keep both versions indexed for this long.
Has anyone seen something like this before?
Sorry, I don't have the domain or Search Console screenshots since they're not my client. They're working with another agency, and I only heard about the situation through a colleague. I'm mainly trying to understand the technical reasons behind something like this, so I know what to look for if I ever encounter it myself.