I've been consistently getting 60% of my traffic from no source, every analytics dashboard says Direct. and I've tried them all. I simply can't imagine people typing in website URL directly since it's a two-month old SAAS.
So can anyone help me with this?
Trying to get a read on how much real-name authorship actually matters for E-E-A-T in a YMYL niche, and I keep talking myself in circles, so I want outside takes.
Setup: I run a healthcare content site under a pen name. I hold a real, relevant credential in the field, so if I attached my actual name and license the authority would be legit. Right now every article carries a "reviewed by [pen name], [credential]" byline, but it's not traceable to a real person.
Where things stand: 150+ articles published, so this isn't a fresh site. Bing has started coming around, roughly 1,000 sessions a month. Google is still basically ignoring me, which I'm reading as classic YMYL sandbox. Pre-revenue. The plan was always to de-anonymize at some revenue milestone and build the LinkedIn/expert side, but that milestone's a long way off.
What I'm trying to figure out:
In a YMYL niche, does a verifiable real-name author with a genuine credential actually move the needle with Google, or is the E-E-A-T weight of a named expert overstated? A pseudonymous "reviewed by" byline seems worthless for trust signals, but I want to hear from people who've tested it.
Anyone flip from pseudonymous to real-name authorship and watch rankings or indexing actually respond? Or was it a nothingburger?
Pre-traction and still sandboxed: is that a reason to wait (no point attaching a name before there's anything there) or a reason to do it now (the verifiable expert entity might be the trust signal that helps me climb out)?
And the piece that actually freezes me: I hold a state-licensed credential in a regulated field, so putting my real name on health content carries board and employer risk that a normal blogger doesn't have. Anyone here in a licensed profession who went public with health-adjacent content, did it ever cause friction, or is that fear overblown?
Looking for the verdict and real experiences, not permission. Thank you in advance.
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Let's see how many SEOs still think it's still valuable and to what extent. I am curious to improve my knowledge with all the answers. If you can share this so more and more SEOs can share their views.
Hey everyone,
I was checking my Google Search Console Crawl Stats report and noticed:
I also see that Googlebot is crawling a lot of image URLs compared to HTML pages.
I've been following Google Search Essentials and SEO best practices, including:
Even after following Google's guidelines, Refresh is much higher than Discovery.
A few questions:
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Hi everyone,
I’m facing a pretty confusing issue with Google and I’m wondering if anyone has ever seen something like this.
My website: https://pc4games.com
Overall, the site is properly indexed and everything looks fine in Google Search Console. If I search for “pc4games.com”, it appears in the results without any issue.
However, when I search for just “pc4games” or “comparateur pc4games”, my website does not show up at all, even though these are clearly brand-related queries. On Bing, though, it appears normally with no problem.
Another worrying point: on Google I only get around 100 impressions per day, while on Bing I get significantly more. I also noticed a sudden drop on April 23rd, where impressions were divided by about 10 overnight, with no clear reason from my side.
I’ve checked the basics (indexing, Search Console, meta tags, etc.), but honestly I can’t figure out what is going on.
If anyone has any idea or has experienced something similar, I’d really appreciate your help, because I’m completely stuck at this point.
Sorry if this isn’t the right subreddit, I don’t really use Reddit that often.
Thanks in advance 🙏
I'm doing SEO for a Web3/DeFi analytics company.
Struggle to find keywords for this industry.
Our founder believes in AEO so he invests no money in tools like Ahref, Semrush for keyword research.
Help!
Looking for people in the same industry for help.
When I think back to when I started out in SEO there were a ton of different tools that could spread backlinks far and wide, there was certainly no shortage of tools to choose from whatever sort of backlinks you wanted.
To give an idea, here are some tools that I can remember off the top of my head that worked to generate many backlinks (of varying quality):
SENuke - dead
Blog Comment Demon - dead
The Free Blog Commenter - dead
Bookmarking Demon - dead
No Hands SEO - dead
GSA SER
Scrapebox - dubious backlinking utility
Money Robot Submitter - dead
Ranker X - not sure about this
Backlink Beast - dead
Article Demon - dead
Xrumer - seems mostly working
The above are just the ones I remember from about 10-15 years ago. Lots are no longer around and those that are don't seem nearly as popular anymore.
The only survivors seem to be the ones that post to randomly hosted platforms, very few target the high authority sites that allow posting to, and good look finding a decent article submitter or directory submitter.
There are so many sites that accept user generated content, it seems crazy that there isn't something modern like this. It is even crazier still now AI has gotten so good at mimicking real people.
So why do you guys think there are so few tools out there that are aimed squarely at creating backlinks?
P.S - bonus points if you can guess which one of the tools above I made :)
The senior of the company where I work always discusses that the SEO is dead in maximum 2 years. But the company is regularly increasing the clients.So I can't understand that why they say SEO is dead and they have the salary of 100000 per month. So what are your thoughts on this. As I am seeing the opportunities the seniors are creating the threat.
I had a small custom post type on my WordPress site, a product-deals section. One summary/archive page, a menu item, and 13 single posts. Google crawled all of them and left them as 'crawled - currently not indexed.' So it saw them and chose not to index them.
I just removed them.
Here is what I am unsure about. Since Google already excluded them from the index, did they ever drag down my overall rankings, or were they already neutral?
I keep seeing two views. One, Mueller framing this status as site-wide, not about the single page, which suggests a pile of low-value pages weighs on how Google judges the whole site. Two, the view that not indexed means not in search, so no direct harm, and removing them is just housekeeping.
My question: has anyone actually seen their indexed pages improve after clearing out a batch of crawled-not-indexed low-value pages? Or is it just pure hygiene with no upside in the rankings?
I built a full SEO strategy for a client in 2025. The site went from basically 0 traffic to solid organic growth, without backlinks, and it helped generate around 300k ARR.
Since then, I built my own tool to produce SEO content faster, and I recently signed a new 2-month contract with the same client to help them with their SEO strategy again.
The issue is that they’re now using Lovable, and honestly, it feels terrible for SEO. I can’t access the actual files, I can’t properly inspect the structure of the website, and for technical SEO it makes everything way harder than it should be.
For example, I ran a crawl and found leftover blog pages that are marked as non-indexable. But when I ask Lovable about it, it says there are no non-indexable blog pages, so I’m kind of stuck. I don’t know whether the crawl is showing old leftovers, hidden routes, duplicated pages, or if Lovable just doesn’t understand the actual website structure.
Do you have any suggestions on how to work properly with a tool like this when doing technical SEO? Especially when I can’t access the codebase or clearly understand the site architecture?
PS : It's worse than I thought, the whole blog is on one file and they want 60 more blog posts this quarter.
Edit : It will make SEOs laugh : I click a page from the blog page the blog shows perfectly, I reload the page becomes a 404 and if I copy paste the same exact link I also get a 404. Also I did not choose lovable they did prior to us working together.
Actually, I made a mistake on our website. I accidentally removed the blog section that had been optimized for SEO. I removed it yesterday, and the changes went live today. As soon as I realized the mistake, I restored the blog section.
I wanted to ask whether this could affect our keyword rankings. Since the content has been restored, do you think the rankings will recover, or is there still a chance of a significant impact?
Let me know guys maybe I can loose my job 🥲
I have one of the biggest brands in my ecom niche, I sell my product wholesale.
When you Google my product, my Google merchant listings don't come up anywhere, but the person I wholesaled my product to, a extremely small boutique shows up first on search results.
Wtf is going on...
Has anyone else experienced this recently?
Here's what's happening on our site:
This isn't happening with just one URL, we're seeing it across many newly published articles.
I know the Page Indexing report can lag, but this seems different since Google crawled the page almost immediately and URL Inspection already confirms it's indexed.
My questions are:
Would love to hear if anyone has seen this recently or received clarification from Google.
Quick question for the SEO folks here. I run a Shopify store and just built a dedicated brand page for one of our main manufacturers. The page has an SEO text that mentions their most popular product lines (which have their own product pages) and links to my generic category pages like accessories etc.
Now I'm second guessing myself. The brand page title targets "brand + product type" keywords, my category pages target the generic product type keywords, and the product pages target the specific model names. The brand text mentions those model names and links to them.
Is mentioning the models and categories on the brand page keyword cannibalization? Or is that only an issue if two pages target the same query in title/H1? My understanding is that internal links with descriptive anchors should actually help Google understand which page owns which keyword, but I want to make sure I'm not setting up my pages to compete against each other.
How do you guys structure brand page vs category page vs product page targeting?
i handle marketing for a few pool companys in FL. this year we noticed a chunk of leads were drying up even though rankings held steady. figured out people are asking chatgpt and perplexity stuff like "who should i hire to replaster my pool in tampa" and there getting answers that aren't us.
hired an agency in february that said they did AEO. four months later i looked at what they actaully did. backlinks and meta descriptions. thats it. same stuff i could of done myself for free.
before that i tried doing structured data and FAQ pages on our own sites. barley moved anything.
is the whole AEO category just a rebrand? genuinely asking because i cant tell anymore
running a wordpress site with about 124 posts, i started this blog in march 2025, all tutorial content in one niche. Most pages are indexed fine but rankings are weak and very bad.
i've been rebuilding the category structure to be more topic specific and cleaning up internal links, but wanted to ask people who've dealt with this kind of issue before.
for those who've had a site plateau like this, was it more of a technical/structure issue for you, or did it come down to content depth and freshness? trying to figure out where to actually spend my time before i burn a month on the wrong fix.
PS: I am indexed and ranking fine on Bing.
hi! I started a photography business this year. launched my website in January. didn’t know what I was doing mostly and am learning SEO along the way. here’s where I’m at:
- 20 five star reviews on GBP with replies from me on all, I regularly add images from my work to my GBP
- listed as services so no address on GBP (I do not have a studio, Google made me reverify when I tried to list an address, it was a pain)
- 22 published blogs optimizing keywords that combine services and location combinations for my work including alt text And image naming w keywords. I have posted these to GBP 2-4 times a month in the updates section
- location pages for various cities and locations near me I would Like to work more in. all with alt text and keyword image names and I tried to keyword optimize them
from GSC, last 28 days:
- 39 total clicks
- 1.68k impressions
- 2.3% average CTR
- average position 19.6
is this good? are there other things I could be doing to improve my SEO? I am a complete newbie here but recognize there could be a lot of opportunity to gain visibility thru seo and my business is brand new.
also, what do you like to use to track keyword ranking? I don’t think I’m ranking for anything really per GSC and am wondering if there are other resources I should be leveraging in tandem to track data as I build.
thank you in advance for reading!
Is SEO still worth investing in for a local service business in a country with a population of around 2 million?
I've often read that the top 3 Google search results receive around 70% of all clicks. But if the first 5 positions are already occupied by competitors' Google Ads, the first organic result ends up much lower on the page.
In this situation, does SEO still provide a good return, or has Google Ads become the only realistic way to attract high-intent traffic from Google Search?
I was going to say - you do the math but Gemini did it for me.
Here's my health report for 500 pages - 1,400 "critical errors"
Yet 510%
So whats going on?
