r/WebsiteSEO

I've been seeing a lot of URLs with "alternate page with proper canonical tag" in google search console and I keep wondering if this is something that i should be worried about or it's just an expected behavior.

My understanding is that these pages have canonical tags pointing to different URLs and google is respecting it, which is fine but the sheer volume of these in one site makes me wonder if everything is setup properly.

When is this considered a problem i.e. Is there a scenario where a large number of alternate pages with canonical tags in a site signifies that there's something wrong in the site's architecture?

I know SEO is a long-term game but are there any quick wins you’d prioritize when taking over an existing SEO setup?

I’m stepping into a role previously handled by another specialist, so I’d love to know where you’d start and which changes can realistically move the needle relatively quickly even a bit

Do you start with search volume and keyword difficulty, customer questions and intent, competitor gaps, or something else? I'm interested in how you balance search demand with what is actually useful to the audience.

for mid-sized websites with around 100–200 pages.

I optimize websites for meta tags and content, but when it comes to internal linking, my mind goes blank. I really need to improve my internal linking skills, so I’d love to know how you guys approach it.

What do you think about when creating internal links? What tools do you use?

This is how I currently do internal linking: I try to find a keyword or phrase related to the page I want to link to and naturally use that keyword as the anchor text. However, sometimes I can’t find a natural opportunity to use the target keyword or a relevant variation.

How do you handle this?

I've noticed SEO is becoming much broader than traditional keyword optimization, with things like AI search, topical authority, user intent and brand visibility becoming more important.

Which area are you investing in the most right now?

If Google removed backlinks as a ranking factor tomorrow, how would your SEO strategy change?

If you can shoot photos, draw or make 3D like me, do this:

Upload about 30 of your own images, on-topic for your site, to Unsplash.

Real files, not AI.

Wait until they get downloads.
Reverse-search each one in Google Lens, Exact matches tab.

Email the sites that used the file and ask for a credit with a link to you.

That is the whole thing. They already picked your image. You are just asking them to name the author.

One of mine is at 755k views and 20k downloads. Lens on a France map I posted pulled a law firm, a savings blog, a management article, a wine-law site. Recheck monthly, new pages keep showing up.

License honesty: Unsplash does not require a credit.

Do not send a copyright threat. Two-line polite ask or skip it.

As a content website owner doing SEO on my own for last 15 years, I feel lost with the current multiple changes in google SERPS because of Ai. The website has also lost about 50% of organic traffic in last 1-1.5 years.

I feel now I need someone to guide me in this highly volatile SE0 landscape. All the gurus I used to follow are all saying different things making it highly confusing.

Should I hire a new SEO person in the team or invest the same money in tools and supporting resources?

Thanks in advance.

I had a client site that was quietly blocking google bots for weeks but before anyone noticed, rankings has already tanked and it took a while for me to figure out why. Since then, I have been paranoid about robot.txt issues on any site I touch.

I do this manually but I'm wondering if there's any reliable robot.txt checker tool that does this job automatically and well especially for larger sites that has multiple directives that might conflict with each other.

What tool do you use to check and validate robot.txt? Kindly share your experience (if any) from a misconfigured file and how you were able to resolve it.

I run a used cycle marketplace with lots of database-driven listing pages (filters, search, dynamic pricing). Currently it's mostly client-side rendered (React SPA).

For 2026 SEO, is pure CSR still viable if I optimize CWV, metadata, sitemaps, and internal linking? Or should I move critical listing pages to SSR/ISR for better crawlability and AI discoverability?

If CSR can work, what's the minimum I must do (e.g., prerender key routes, dynamic metadata, structured data)? If SSR is strongly recommended, which pages should I prioritize (category, product, blog)?

I am thinking about building a tool that does the following:

Put your website url >>> the tool identifies SEO problems >>> it optimizes your SEO and give back the code of the new website.

Been building my own freelance SEO business and just finished the website:
https://visibilitystudio.co/

I’ve been looking at it for so long that I’m probably missing obvious things.

If you were doing an SEO review of this site, what would you prioritise first?

I’m particularly interested in:
• Site structure and internal linking
• Search intent and keyword targeting
• Service page structure
• E-E-A-T / trust signals
• Technical SEO issues
• Anything that could hurt organic visibility
• Anything that looks good on paper but is actually pointless

I’m not looking for a generic SEO audit or a score from a tool. I’d like to hear what an experienced SEO would actually change and why.

Be as critical as you want.

What makes DA increases fast on page or off page SEO?

Hello

DISCLAIMER: I am not posting this for promotional reasons or whatsoever. I am posting real data here so hopefully people could have a look and share their insights so I can learn and understand better what the matter might be.

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I am based in Belgium and have been working as a software engineer for nearly a decade, but as some of you know the job market is pretty brutal right now almost everywhere in the world. I am about to get laid off and have not found a job since multiple months. So I have decided to work as a roofer on the side so I -hopefully- don't end up without any revenue once I am officialy laid off. My father, who is very old now, taught me how to install roofing on flat roofs. I have helped him a lot when I was younger and have also entirely renovated the different roofs of my house as well as that of friends. I am confident I can take on almost any flat roof as a contractor. I know for a fact, that roofers are currently overbooked. You have multiple months of waiting period whenever you want them to come do something. So, the market is in need for more roofers where I live.

In order to land clients, I have now made the following website: https://www.dao-toiture.be/

However in the last 3-4 months I have not had a single call and would like to understand why. Based on the google-analytics information I receive, it seems like I get something like 30 visitors per month on my webpage. This IMO does not seem too bad, yet no clients.

If that matters, I also have a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584798562095

No, idea if having a facebook page helps. But it costs nothing to create one.

Could someone help me explain what the matter is? Why am I not getting significantly more calls considering the big demand there is? Is my website very bad? Is my SEO poor? Or is my google business profile somehow missing something?

I would be open to any input from you.

Thanks

Depending on where I look, I keep seeing different answers, some said one word, others said two while the rest said anything less than three counts.

This matters to me because it changes how I categorize keywords when I am building content for my clients. I wouldn't want to be targeting what i think are short tail keywords and building content strategies around them when the definition is wrong.

What's the actual working definition you use? And does the distinction between short tail and mid tail matter that much in practice or are they mostly semantics at this point?

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:

1. Since content renders fine without JS, does blocking /_next/ actually hurt rankings, or is it more of a "looks bad in Google's render but doesn't matter for indexing" situation?
2. Does the blocked images issue (via /_next/image) actually stop those images from showing in Google Images, or does Google still index them some other way?
3. What's the cleanest fix here — just remove the /_next/ disallow entirely, or scope it down to something like blocking only /_next/static/chunks/ while allowing /_next/static/css/ and /_next/image?