r/SEO

I run a small family business with my dad and honestly don't know what to do anymore. Over the past two weeks we've been getting random 1 star Google reviews from people we've never dealt with. Some of the reviews don't even make sense, one complains about a service we don't offer and another describes something completely unrelated to our business.

We've spent years building our reputation and had a 4.5 star rating, which has now dropped to 3.8. I know that might not seem like a big deal, but we've noticed fewer calls lately and even had a customer mention she almost didn't come in because of our reviews. My dad's in his 60s and keeps asking me how people who've never visited us can leave reviews, and I genuinely don't know what to tell him.

I've reported every fake review to Google, but it's been almost two weeks and nothing has happened. I've searched everywhere for how to remove fake Google reviews, but all the advice just says to flag them, which I've already done. I'm worried that responding to them publicly will just make things worse.

Has anyone successfully managed to get fake Google reviews removed? Is there a way to escalate this or contact Google support directly? I'd really appreciate hearing what actually worked because this is starting to affect our business.

If you're a software engineer and you know next to nothing about SEO, where do you start?

What's really a valuable resource for a beginner?

I always thought building something was the hard part. Now it's definitely, no contest, hands down marketing / selling it.

I need to learn these skills. From zero. Throw me a bone here, please!

It's for a web analytics and revenue attribution saas, although I suspect general advice is plenty applicable at this stage.

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what's up with the NMC guidelines. what all are you changing?

so after seeing all the "are AI bots ignoring robots.txt" threads i wanted to actually test it instead of guessing from logs.

the problem with guessing is anyone can set any user agent, and a lot of these fetchers don't come from published ip ranges. so every AI got its own secret url, nothing linked to it anywhere, meaning whatever hit that url had to be that AI. cloudflare worker in front logging everything. then in a fresh chat i asked each one to open the link and tell me a code that's on the page.

claude checked robots.txt before touching anything on a new site. when i disallowed the page it just refused and said it wouldn't try to get around it. kinda polite honestly

chatgpt was the interesting one. first visit to a brand new site it went straight to the disallowed page without reading robots.txt. about 76 seconds later OAI-SearchBot shows up and reads robots.txt. next time i asked, chatgpt refused the page without even making a request. so it learns the rules after the first visit lol

gemini comes in with a user agent that's literally just "Google" and never read robots.txt once. the ips weren't on any of google's published lists either

grok is where it got weird. every request, 9 to 12 different ips hit the page, most within a few seconds, all claiming to be chrome or safari. hosting companies, small isps in brazil, mexico, poland. a couple came through a network registered to oxylabs (the proxy company). 59 ips over 6 requests and it never reused one. never touched robots.txt

perplexity only sent its crawler to read my robots.txt and homepage, then told me the link might be phishing

to be fair openai and google both say fetches a user asks for can skip robots.txt, so those two are doing what they say. and it's a small test, few runs each, one day. but blocking by user agent clearly only stops the bots that tell you their name

also the first time i ran this i opened all the links in my own browser before pasting them, so the only visitor in my logs was me. took me a minute to figure out why every AI apparently used brave on windows

anyone else seeing bursts of chrome/safari traffic from random isps right after someone asks grok about a page?

Current site: DR 38, ~15k clicks/month, avg position ~10. B2B SaaS / agency space and growing pretty aggressively.

I want to launch a directory with at least a few thousand pages using unique first-party client data that we have explicit consent to publish.

My concern is Google interpreting it as scaled content abuse and hurting the rest of the domain.

If the directory is genuinely useful and each page is based on real unique data, how would you structure the rollout?

Would you:
launch everything at once or in batches?

put it on the main domain, subdomain, or separate domain?

noindex weaker pages initially?

require a minimum amount of unique content/data per page?

worry about crawl/index bloat before worrying about the actual spam policy?

Would especially appreciate input from anyone who has launched a large directory after the recent Google spam / scaled-content updates.

Ps. If that is relevant the data we have is related to sales, marketing so im 99% sure nobody else has anything like that. It would also help vendors looking for an agency decide the best choice for their company

I've founded a competitive intelligence saas, and am looking to improve SEO by getting more backlinks.

I was wondering if being cited by Wikipedia helps with that?

Obviously, a month-old saas with no paying customers doesn't warrant an entry of its own, and I'm not talking about spamming loads of links back to my site wherever I can squeeze them in. I was just wondering about carefully located references where they genuinely add value (for example on a page about a particular company, I would add a comment, and a cited link back to a relevant report generated by my saas).

Is this worth the effort of researching and building these reference links? Or is it just something that would get ignored by search engines?

I am currently getting 30-50k monthly views, and it regularly appears on google discover. However, it has no google news presence. Website is around 7 months old

I had absolutely no clue what SEO even meant and how it works but by damn ADHD brain got obsessed with reviving my 2 year old site and I spent hours reading every post in this sub trying to understand SEO and everything felt hopeless but I can finally start seeing the compounding effect of my daily small efforts. Happy to answer any questions and share what worked for me and this is no promotion and I’m not trying to sell anyone anything here.

How do you find someone to write organic content?

My clients sites tanked because of AI content... done by freelancers...

Home service niche is not easy to write...

I’m having peaks of traffic from Germany and Finland, all bot pattern (no engagement, 1-2 seconds visits).

Are you experiencing the same? Are you doing anything against it: blocking bots, filtering them in GA4?

We have advertised on Google for nearly two decades, going back close to the beginning of AdWords. It has created enormous value for us.

At the same time, my own use of traditional Google Search has fallen dramatically over the last three years, particularly this year. Restaurants, local services, B2B vendor discovery, product research and general information increasingly start with AI.

I am curious whether SEO practitioners are seeing a change not just in the amount of Google traffic, but in its composition.

My hypothesis is that AI displacement is not random.

A simple navigational query does not benefit much from AI. Complex research does. Evaluating software, professional services, financial products or a major purchase benefits substantially from synthesis, comparison and follow-up questions.

That raises the possibility that Google could retain huge volumes of simple searches while losing a smaller number of economically valuable research sessions.

For sites losing organic Google traffic, what is disappearing first?

Are informational queries taking most of the damage, or are commercial investigation and high-consideration queries declining too?

Are you seeing differences between low-value traffic and visitors that historically generated meaningful leads or revenue?

Are B2B, financial services, legal, healthcare, software or other high-value categories behaving differently?

Has traffic fallen while conversions remained resilient, or are conversions and lead quality beginning to deteriorate as well?

The dataset I would love to see is Google traffic since 2022 or 2023 segmented by query intent, commercial value, conversion rate and industry.

Aggregate traffic decline tells us very little if the mix is changing.

The question I keep coming back to is: which traffic is disappearing, who generated it, and what was that traffic economically worth?

Equally interested in evidence that disproves the hypothesis.

Sorry if this sort of post gets asked a lot. Feel free to link me to previous answers if that is the case.

I am not an SEO professional. I have taken a few classes and trainings and was able to push some of my partner's money pages up fairly high on Google searches. This has led to a few people in her field reaching out for help with their own websites.

What should I charge for this sort of thing? Would it be better to quote them for a package or hourly? I'm planning to do a consultation to go over what all they want done, should I bring up a retainer to maintain their rankings or just leave it as a one and done deal?

Please help, I'm a lost little video production guy who would love an alternate revenue stream.

As an SEO specialist for an e-commerce store, is my job to generate organic traffic or to convert that traffic into sales?

I'm working on SEO for an e-commerce store and I'm trying to understand where the responsibility of an SEO specialist ends.

If I'm bringing relevant organic traffic with transactional/search intent to product and category pages, but the conversion rate is low, should I be responsible for improving the traffic-to-sale conversion as well?

Or is the SEO specialist mainly responsible for:

• Getting the website to rank
• Bringing relevant/qualified organic traffic
• Matching search intent to the right landing page
• Improving organic clicks and visibility

And then the CRO/e-commerce team is responsible for turning that traffic into customers through product-page optimization, trust signals, UX, checkout, pricing, etc.?

For example, if 100 people come from Google with transactional intent but only 1 purchases, where would you consider the SEO specialist's responsibility to end and CRO's responsibility to begin?

I'd like to hear from people who work in e-commerce SEO/CRO about how you define this responsibility in practice.