r/bigseo

Hey everyone, quick SEO question.

I’ve got two pages clashing in the SERPs:
A commercial “[subject] service” page
An informational “What is [subject]?” page

At the moment, the “What is” article is ranking better, but ultimately I want to drive more visibility and enquiries through the money/service page.

Would you consolidate the informational content into the service page and redirect the “What is” URL, or keep both pages live and work on differentiating the intent/internal linking?

Interested to hear how others would approach the cannibalisation.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

Hi everyone,

We recently migrated our website from .NET to Next.js.

After the migration, we noticed a strange issue. If we open around 20 pages at the same time, some pages randomly show a 404 error. If we refresh the same page once or twice, it loads normally.

I also checked our GA data and found that users coming from Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity have sometimes landed on these 404 pages.

But when I open the same URLs manually, they work normally.

Has anyone faced this type of issue with Next.js? What could cause an intermittent 404 like this?

Developer here, I run a handful of my own sites and do backend work for clients. What scares me isn't rankings, it's deploys. A release that ships a noindex meta tag or a staging canonical to production sits there silently until the next crawl notices, and by then Google noticed first.

ContentKing used to be the answer for this as far as I can tell, but since Conductor swallowed it there's no standalone product anymore. Everything I've looked at since falls into one of two buckets: full enterprise suites where monitoring is a feature buried in a platform I don't need, or crawlers that run daily/weekly audits (Sitebulb, Ahrefs alerts, etc), which is way too slow for "a deploy just broke it 4 minutes ago".

What I actually want is dumb and narrow: watch robots meta, robots.txt and canonicals on maybe 20 important pages, recheck right after a deploy, ping me when something drifts.

Nothing I've found does the deploy-triggered part at all.

So, people who were on ContentKing before the acquisition: what did you move to? Or is everyone just eating the risk and finding out from Search Console two weeks later?

I'm trying to build a reliable way to see which of our domains are reliably being parsed and cited by different models. Running manual prompts is fine for a quick check, but the outputs change and I have no systematic way to log what the model retrieved versus what it ignored.

I need a repeatable protocol. If you are trying to map how your content is attributed across different engines, what does your testing setup look like? I want actionable data not just spreadsheet full of random observations.

Sometimes everything looks fine on paper but the page just doesn’t move.

Other times something that was doing well starts slipping, a competitor jumps ahead, traffic slowly fades, or a page you were sure would perform just… doesn’t.

This is the part of SEO I actually find the most interesting, because nobody really handles it the same way.

Some people just wait it out. Some start tweaking things straight away. Some go straight to checking competitors. Some dig back into old data to see what changed. And I’m sure people who’ve been doing this for a while start to notice patterns and instinctively know where to look first.

So when you run into stuff like this, what’s your first move? What tells you “change this” vs “leave it alone”?

We run an established site with real organic traffic, around ~3M clicks in the last 90 days, and there are no manual actions in Search Console. The site publishes new landing pages regularly.

The issue is very specific:

Older pages are still crawled and indexed normally. Roughly 99% of our older URLs are fine.

But new landing pages created since January mostly end up in:(Discovered – currently not indexed)And they stay there for months.

For the newer URLs, less than ~20% seem to get crawled/indexed automatically. The rest are discovered by Google, but Google just never comes back to crawl them.The strange part is that if I use URL Inspection and manually request indexing, the same URLs usually get crawled and indexed within minutes. This happens consistently.

So it doesn’t look like Google *can’t* crawl the pages. The pages are accessible, indexable, and apparently acceptable once submitted manually. Google just doesn’t seem to want to crawl them through normal discovery anymore.

We also have another site in the same business/niche, with a broadly similar operating model, page type, and internal-linking strategy. However, the indexing performance is completely different.

One site currently has very poor indexing for new pages, although it used to perform much better in the past. The other site still has a very high indexing rate.

One important difference: one site is structured as a subdirectory, while the other is structured as a subdomain. I’m not sure if that matters here, but I wanted to mention it.

Things we’ve already tried:

- Resubmitted XML sitemaps

- Added stronger internal links to the new pages

- Placed links to new pages in high-visibility areas, including the header, search/discovery areas, and some of the most frequently crawled pages on the site

- Removed/410’d low-value junk URLs to reduce crawl waste

- Cleaned up thin or duplicate pages

- Checked for obvious technical blockers like noindex, robots.txt, canonicals, redirects, etc.

- Compared it against the other similar site we own, where the architecture/internal-linking strategy is broadly similar but the indexing behavior is much better

- Used manual indexing, which works, but the daily limit can’t keep up with our publishing volume

My questions:

1. Why would Google crawl and index a new URL almost immediately after manual submission, but not crawl/index it when the same URL is discovered through sitemaps or internal links?
2. What signals would make Google “discover” new URLs but decide not to crawl them automatically for months, even on an established site with strong traffic?
3. What could cause two similar sites in the same niche, with similar operating methods and page architecture, to have very different indexing rates for new pages, especially when the weaker site used to index much better before?
4. Could subdirectory vs subdomain structure affect this kind of crawl/indexing behavior, or is it more likely a site-level quality/trust/crawl-priority issue?

Has anyone seen this pattern and recovered from it without manually submitting every URL?

I'm having a strange problem that I can't seem to figure out. Everytime I publish a new blog post, it gets indexed and typically ranks well for about 4-5 days, and then it just completely disappears from the search results, even when checking the first 10 pages.

The strange thing is that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com, it still seems to be indexed, but it has "Archive" in the title, and a different URL.

For example:

Original URL:

abc.com/blog/x-y-z

What I'm seeing:

abc.com/blog/tag/x-y-z

This has happened for about 25-30 posts so far. Has anyone seen something like this before? Could it be a WordPress issue, canonical issue, or maybe tags? I'm really at a loss here, and would really appreciate any insight anyone could provide.

I run a super small online store in the pet niche (food + accessories, all online, no physical shop). I’ve been slowly growing it for about 2 years, mostly off Instagram and word of mouth.

This week a regular customer told me she tried to Google us to show a friend and “you basically don’t exist there.” That stung a bit and sent me into a late-night SEO spiral. I was reading blogs, case studies about UX fixing conversion issues, even stuff on starting clothing brands and random analyses on sites like netpeak and now my head’s kinda spinning.

For a business doing low 5 figures a month in revenue, is it actually worth paying someone for SEO in 2026, or should I keep hacking at it myself and focus on paid ads/social instead? If you hired an SEO/marketing agency or freelancer at this stage, what did you pay, how long before you saw real results, and what would you do differently?

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I don’t want to burn cash on something that won’t move the dial for a tiny shop like mine.

I have been working on SEO for the past year, and the website has started receiving a good number of impressions. Over the last three months, the website generated approximately 301K impressions, but only 280 clicks, while the average position is around 10 in the SERPs.

Could someone please suggest what strategies or optimizations I should implement to improve the CTR (Click-Through Rate) and convert these impressions into more clicks?

Any suggestions, practical tips, or insights from your experience would be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

I run a content site, roughly 1,600 pages. A small share of the URLs are interactive tool pages and they earn most of the clicks. The rest is supporting reference and guide content. Newer domain, growing fast all year, nothing shady in the link profile, no paid links.

Since early July, Google organic keeps cutting out almost completely, then coming back. It happened again Saturday around midday, which is why I'm finally posting. Can't attach images in this sub, so numbers will have to do the work.

The daily picture over 3 months: steady growth from May, peaking around 3K clicks a day. Then four sudden collapses: July 2, July 9, July 20, and now Aug 9. Each one cuts clicks by 65 to 75% within a day. The first two recovered in 2 to 3 days. The third stayed pinned at the floor for 11 straight days, barely moving, then recovered. Here's the strange part: every recovery has come back to new all time highs. Between episodes the site performs better than ever. The 3 month totals are 117K clicks and 2.5M impressions at an average position of 7.

Saturday's onset, hour by hour: clicks ran steady at 130 to 140 an hour all morning, then dropped to 25 to 35 an hour over about two hours around midday, and that's where it still is. Impressions fell much harder in the same window, from about 4K an hour down to a few hundred. Nothing was deployed or changed on my side that morning. It was a Saturday.

I've dug into the long July episode properly (I have the GSC bulk export in BigQuery), and the pattern is consistent every time:

• The number of distinct queries the site appears for collapses about 90% (13.5k down to 1.5k over comparable 3 day windows). Distinct URLs served drops about 60%. Page+query combinations drop about 90%.
• On the ~1,100 page+query pairs Google KEPT serving through the July episode, the median position change was zero. But impressions on those same pairs still fell about 70%. Same queries, same rankings, shown to far fewer people.
• Average CTR and average position both "improve" during an episode. As far as I can tell that's an artifact: the long tail disappears from the averages and only the strong head terms are left. Daily CTR jumps from about 5% to over 20% during these windows.
• The damage is selective. Pages that own one strong head query hold steady or even gain clicks. Pages that were showing up for a wide spread of long tail queries drop to near zero. My guide/reference section loses ~95% of clicks, tool pages lose ~70%.

What I've ruled out:

• Manual actions and security issues: none, checked in the GSC UI.
• Technical: crawled the site with Googlebot's user agent during an episode. Everything 200, correct canonicals, no stray noindex, sitemap fine, content fully server rendered.
• My own changes: the onsets don't line up with any deploy, and one episode ended with me having changed nothing at all.
• Tracking: server side analytics show the identical drop, and only Google traffic falls. Other channels stay flat.
• Device and country: everything down by similar percentages across the board.
• The impressions reporting change from last year: clicks and real sessions genuinely drop, this isn't a reporting artifact.

My working theory: most of my URLs are long tail content earning under 5 clicks per URL per week, and a decent chunk earns nothing in a given week, while a small set of tool pages carries the site. I was also publishing new pages at a steady clip through July. My guess is some domain level threshold keeps getting re-evaluated and the thin tail is what trips it. But that theory has a hole I can't close: if Google decided the site was low quality, why does it keep restoring it to new highs after each episode? A demotion doesn't usually behave like a breaker flipping.

Questions:

• Has anyone seen this on/off whole domain pattern before? Days-long total serving contractions with full recovery in between?
• Is this a known thing with newer domains getting re-evaluated?
• Would pruning or noindexing the zero click tail actually help, or is that unrelated to whatever is doing this?

Hey everyone,
My site’s favicon suddenly disappeared from the Google search results, and I’m trying to figure out what could have caused it.

The strange part is that the favicon still appears correctly on my subdomains, but it no longer shows for the root domain.

As far as I know, nothing has been changed on the site. No developer has worked on it, no one has modified the favicon, and the setup has been the same since day one.
I’ve also checked Google Search Console and everything looks normal.

The favicon itself is still working when I visit the website directly, so this seems to be specifically related to how Google is displaying it in the SERPs.

Has anyone experienced something similar recently?
What could cause Google to suddenly remove a favicon from the SERPs while the subdomains still have theirs?
Any ideas on what I should check beyond GSC would be greatly appreciated!

What is Google OKF and Should SEOs Use It?

Hi everyone,

I noticed that Google is crawling many /\_next/image URLs.we already have the original image URLs, but Next.js also creates its own image URLs. Because of this, bot is crawling both URLs.

I am worried that this may use our crawl budget.

What is the best way to handle these URLs?, Should i use robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag?

I don't want to anything that could affect the indexing of our main pages.

Has anyone faced the same issue on a large Next.js website? What solution worked for you?

Thanks in advance!

In recent days, I have been job hunting to find new job opportunities. In that, I If I find any new job updates. I'll review the business model & their offerings carefully. Then, if it matches my profile, I'll hit the submit button

During this process, I had the opportunity to review most businesses with broad IT services offerings.

Please, anyone, clarify my doubt about this point.

Businesses should be in a niche-specific environment, which not only helps the business to create a strong USP but also helps marketing professionals to clearly define the ICP.

Some of the business does not have adequate information on their website about their offering, or they will be stick into broad offering. In this case, It put seo professional into a big challenge at it's first phase of implementation

Anyone who works in an agency environment might often encounter this kind of scenario with a domain. How would you handle it & what steps would you take to approach this process

I'm building landing pages for an online internship. Since the internship is completely online, the curriculum, trainers, duration, fees, certification, and most of the content are identical across all pages.

The only thing that changes is the target city (e.g., city 1, city 2, city3 , etc..), along with some city-specific information that I plan to add.

My question is:

• Does Google consider it a problem if the content is the same across these location pages?
• How much unique, city-specific content would you recommend adding to make each page valuable?

"You look like you're overdue for a mediocre weinering." My website ranked #5 for that query, but my website sells knives and fidgets. Hilarious... but what in the world? Why? Have you ever seen this happen before? 100% conversion too lol

Most business owners tie every marketing activity directly to revenue. 

If someone from marketing talks about their experimentation, they first ask 

How much return can we get from this? And only very few can understand the collaborative approach required to provide a pipeline to the business.

Here, considering the business's primary goal. Many marketing professionals always prioritize the BOFU channel. In that audience who already had the purchase intent & you need to target them with the right keyword & content (speaking from an SEO perspective ) to reach them & can get the desired action from them smoothly. But the remaining funnel areas were often overlooked.

I want to know those who have been creating a full-funnel strategy to deliver results for your business. How would you nurture & what type of strategies help you to move from their funnel stage that can contribute to the sales pipeline?

I know that convincing someone who is in the upper funnel is much harder than someone who already has purchase intent. Looking forward to hearing about your thoughts, challenges, and approaches to this phase

Specifically, I’m looking for resources, creators, courses, or communities that cover:

Practical/Hands-On Learning: Resources that offer real-world examples or updated frameworks rather than outdated 2018 playbook summaries.

If you’re currently practicing SEO in 2026, where are you staying up to date? Are there specific newsletters, YouTube channels, courses, podcasts, or blogs that actually focus on the shift toward GEO and AEO?

Appreciate any recommendations!