u/vladbogza

Hey all, I have been researching CTR manipulation(I don't plan to do it). I see both sides. I feel that people who are against CTR manipulation say that it is not a real trust signal, it's unethical, etc.

But isn't buying backlinks the same exact thing? Its manipulation from other sites. I feel that this is not looked down on at all.

Or take writing content on a clients site. Google recently said that it does not want that. i.e How will a marketing agency in NY understand anything about a law firm in Nevada?

It almost seems that apart from technical SEO, everything else is "bad" and "frowned upon by Google".

Can someone help me understand why CTR manipulation is looked at so poorly yet most of what SEO agencies do is technically not allowed?

Hey all, I have been researching CTR manipulation(I don't plan to do it). I see both sides. I feel that people who are against CTR manipulation say that it is not a real trust signal, it's unethical, etc.

But isn't buying backlinks the same exact thing? Its manipulation from other sites. I feel that this is not looked down on at all.

Or take writing content on a clients site. Google recently said that it does not want that. i.e How will a marketing agency in NY understand anything about a law firm in Nevada?

It almost seems that apart from technical SEO, everything else is "bad" and "frowned upon by Google".

Can someone help me understand why CTR manipulation is looked at so poorly yet most of what SEO agencies do is technically not allowed?

Hey all, I have been researching CTR manipulation(I don't plan to do it). I see both sides. I feel that people who are against CTR manipulation say that it is not a real trust signal, it's unethical, etc.

But isn't buying backlinks the same exact thing? Its manipulation from other sites. I feel that this is not looked down on at all.

Or take writing content on a clients site. Google recently said that it does not want that. i.e How will a marketing agency in NY understand anything about a law firm in Nevada?

It almost seems that apart from technical SEO, everything else is "bad" and "frowned upon by Google".

Can someone help me understand why CTR manipulation is looked at so poorly yet most of what SEO agencies do is technically not allowed?

Hey, everyone. The last few years, I have been getting backlinks for my clients from general marketplaces. I am looking for a place where we can get better backlinks and ones not from link farms. Anyone have suggestions, places, or personal strategies that work to get backlinks?

Hey guys. I have a roofing client who for years has targeted both shingle and metal roofs. The margin on shingle roofs has shrunk significantly while metal roofs have gotten way better margins. They are making the switch to target only metal roofs.

In their ad campaign we targeted both metal and shingle roofs along with general roofing terms: i.e: "Metal roof contractor" and "roofing contractor" in one campaign.

With their new switch in targeting, do you recommend that I make a new ad campaign with metal roof keywords or update the existing campaign to remove all shingle keywords. The campaign currently gets 15-20 conversions a month so I wonder if the historical conversion data of both types of roofing terms are going to confuse the algo.

Thanks in advance and let me know if you need additional info.

Hey guys, I have a roofing company client in Texas. They are small company that spends about 1k/month in ads. The performance has gone down the last few months.
March - 6 leads
April - 2 leads
May - nothing yet.

Clicks have not dropped, no garbage keywords, impression share remained somewhat steady. However, the top of page rate has gone down a little bit.

I am thinking it can be one of the following:

1. Competitors entered the market. Spending more budget to get the top of page rate.
2. Our mix of keywords + landing page doesn't work anymore. This is weird because performance had been steady for 6 months.
3. I made some slight changes to ad copy but they were small. i.e: Instead of "Free Inspection" I added "Get A Free Inspection".

Any thoughts on what could be hurting performance?

Hey guys, been researching AI content lately and tools like SORO, SemRush, etc. Has anyone noticed that their AI generated content does not get indexed? And the indexed pages rank so low that nobody sees it?

Hey guys, been researching AI content lately and tools like SORO, SemRush, etc. Has anyone noticed that their AI generated content does not get indexed? And the indexed pages rank so low that nobody sees it?

Took on a new client this week — local phone repair shop. He came to me because his previous SEO agency had been billing him for months and he wasn't seeing any results.

I logged into his GSC and Search Console expecting the usual stuff (thin content, no backlinks, broken canonicals). Instead I found something I've genuinely never seen before.

The agency had generated hundreds of pages with URLs like:

/repair?k=8f3k2j

/repair?k=2m9x1p

/repair?k=7q4r8t

...and so on. Every single one of them was the exact same service page content. Just the same template with a random ID parameter tacked onto the URL.

I'm assuming the "logic" was: more pages indexed = bigger site = Google trusts you more = better rankings.

The actual result:

- Most of these pages never got indexed (Google correctly flagged them as duplicates)

- The few that did index ranked nowhere

- Crawl budget completely wasted on junk URLs

- His real service pages were getting ignored because Google was busy crawling parameter spam

- Site quality signals tanked

He paid them for 6+ months. Zero calls from organic.

Cleanup plan is going to be: canonical the parameter URLs to the clean version, disallow the parameter in robots.txt, submit a clean sitemap, and rebuild the actual service/location pages with real content.

Anyone else seen this exact tactic in the wild? Curious if this is some "strategy" being taught somewhere or if it was just one agency winging it.