r/bigseo

Context: The brand I'm working with hired an SEO agency to help grow authority.

Now, from what I understand, SEO = organic link building, which means we shouldn't be paying for links. Somehow, this 3rd-party agency is only bringing in paid links ($25, $50, sometimes $150/link) depending on what they and the webmaster they reached out to agreed on.

The agency also tried to provide content suggestions, but they're more tangent topics to what the brand actually provides. From what I understand, Google wants depth on topical authority and rewards it better than breadth/chasing keywords. I've read that Hubspot lost a lot of traffic with the recent updates because they had a lot of breadth-driven campaigns (among other things, of course).

I'm big on giving marketers/SEO an ample budget, but I think there's a need to rethink their efforts if it looks like we're bleeding money. How would you move about this?

Addendum: If it's okay that we also do some paid links, what is a good ratio of paid and unpaid? And am I asking the right questions here?

Thanks crowd,

jr. seo in training

Hey everyone, hoping to get some outside perspective on this.

Site: a taxi/transfer service site in Sri Lanka

For the past 3 months my Search Console performance was pretty stable averaging around 25-40 clicks/day and 800-1600 impressions/day, with one clear spike around late May/early June (hit \~60 clicks and 2.4K impressions in a single day).

Average CTR sits at 1.4%, average position 9.3.
Then in the last few days of the graph (right around 6/28-7/1), both clicks and impressions crashed to almost zero and have stayed flat since.

Total for the 3-month period: 1.85K clicks, 128K impressions.

A few things I’m trying to rule out:

No recent core update that I’m aware of in that exact window

Haven’t touched robots.txt or made major site changes recently

Not sure yet if it’s indexing-related, a manual action, or a technical issue (server/hosting/DNS)

Questions for anyone who’s seen this pattern before:
Is a cliff-drop like this (not a gradual decline) usually more indicative of a technical/crawl issue vs. an algorithmic hit?

What’s the first place you’d check Coverage report, manual actions, robots.txt, or something else?

Anyone else notice a wider pattern of drops around this same late-June/early-July timeframe?

Happy to share more screenshots if it helps diagnose.

Thanks in advance.

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?

Hi,

I'm launching my website to promote my productivity application. I learned that SEO was very important to maximize visits on my website. So my strategy is, in addition to optimize the interface, to publish regularly articles about news, app content and general topics (tips, educative articles...) to have better search results.

I'm thinking about the structure of my articles and I'm wondering if a Q/A section at the end of the article that would help to quickly synthetize the informations would help for SEO.

Any advices and experiences ?

So, we were making regular blogs for some time, we used template for them. Saw great growth and nice impressions (but clicks rarely grew). Since this feb ending, our growth has been going down, rn, its 80% down, we are freaking out. We are correcting landing pages that lost he most impressions and clicks, slowly rewriting blogs and redirecting them. Its weird we dont even see a single upward trend, not even for a week. Im super worried and need some advice, ideas, checks, possible issues, etc.

Sorry for my typing and sentences, been trying to do all and everything but im just getting very confused.
I also found that this reduced growth also concides with the google's new update around EEAT. I'm suspecting its something related to content being detected lacking depth. But should I also focus branded mentions, new content, aggressive social media, UGC, etc.

Over the last 3 months, a few of our top-ranking pages have been steadily losing rankings. At the same time, I'm seeing an average of ~30 spam backlinks being created daily, and I don't see any of the same links in GSC.

Now that those pages have dropped significantly in rankings, the volume of those spam links has also reduced to around 3 per day on average. I don't know if it's just a coincidence, but the pattern caught my attention.

What I've already checked:

GSC links

Continued optimising pages based on SERP changes

Continued building quality backlinks

Previously disavowed a few suspicious links (about a month ago)

I know Google generally says these kinds of links are ignored, so I'm not jumping to conclusions. I'm just trying to understand whether anyone has seen a similar pattern in the real world.

Has anyone experienced something like this? Any insights would be appreciated.

I’m using Google Trends for keyword and niche research, but it seems like there may be some kind of daily request limit or temporary throttling when I make too many searches.

I’m not trying to bypass any restrictions or scrape aggressively. I’m mainly trying to understand the best practical way to work with Trends data more reliably.

For people who use Google Trends regularly:

• Do you usually cache results locally?
• Do you batch queries and run them less frequently?
• Are there better workflows for comparing many keywords?
• Are there reliable alternative data sources for trend validation?
• Is there any recommended way to avoid getting temporarily blocked while staying within normal usage?

I’d love to hear how others structure their workflow for keyword research without running into request limits.

Bing is blocking my website (bina.capital) altogether. I have indexed pages ~ 3mo ago, but now it's absolute zero with no impression at all.

I checked everything I could imagine, sitemap is working as expected and we have good number of pages indexed on Google.

Any tips or tricks on how I can get past this?

Programmatic pages scale incredibly well in the beginning, but eventually similar templates become targeting nearly identical searches.

Performance doesn't collapse overnight it slowly flattens

How are people preventing that???

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, Lately, I've been thinking more seriously about investing in SEO for my business, but I'm still unsure whether it's really worth the cost. On one hand, many people say organic search traffic is one of the most profitable customer acquisition channels in the long run. On the other hand, I keep coming across stories from business owners who paid agencies for years without seeing any meaningful growth. I'd love to hear from people who have been through the process. Specifically: ● Did you see a real increase in leads or sales? ● How long did it take before you noticed results? ● Did you hire an agency or build an in-house team? ● Was the investment worthwhile? I'm looking for honest opinions rather than promotional responses. Does SEO still make sense as an investment today, or are there better channels to focus on?

i manage 30+ sites and i swear every day it's just opening GSC, clicking into a site, looking at clicks, going back, clicking the next one... there's no way to see them all at once which drives me nuts. SEOgets used to do it but I am not paying $49/mo for a dashboard... every time i wanna compare to last month i gotta set the date range again for every single property.

when i actually think about it im only ever looking for the same stuff. pages that are bleeding clicks, queries sitting just off page one, that kinda thing. the rest i just scroll past and pretend im analyzing lol.

anyway is everyone just dealing with this or am i missing some obvious better way to do it

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some real-world advice from agency pros and technical SEOs who deal with YMYL niches and ongoing Negative SEO attacks.

The Background:
I run a data-driven finance and crypto portal focused also on consumer protection. The domain is historically mine, but it sat dormant with almost no updates for about a year. In February, I reactivated it and have been pushing high-quality, original content, data studies, and infographics massively.

The Good News:
On-page and technicals seem completely fine. Bing and DuckDuckGo love the site—my evergreen educational articles and core informational guides are often ranking in positions 1–5 there. Also, Googlebot is crawling good; new content gets indexed within hours.

The Problem (Negative SEO):
Because a part of my content involves exposing financial and crypto scams to protect users, I am under constant attack by the scam operators using Blackhat methods. The domain gets hit of automated spam links (PBN networks like ⁠bhs-links⁠, ⁠seo-anomaly⁠, and recently, expired ⁠.de⁠ domains repurposed as toxic redirects).

My Google Search Console graph is completely flat: around 50k impressions over the last 3 months, but a CTR under 1% because Google keeps my main informational guides parked on pages 3 to 5. No manual actions.

My Current Setup:
I updated my Disavow file a few months ago to block the main automated networks (⁠domain:⁠ level) and just added the newly discovered expired redirect domains a few days ago.

My Question to the Pros:
Google constantly states that they simply ignore spam links nowadays and that disavowing is rarely necessary. However, given that this is a highly sensitive YMYL niche and the site was dormant while the spam kept coming, the "signal-to-noise ratio" was heavily distorted before I reactivated it.

In your actual client experience, do you still use the Disavow tool for heavy, targeted negative SEO attacks?
Or do you completely rely on Google's automated filters and just focus on drowning the spam out with clean, authoritative backlinks?

For those who did disavow in similar situations, did it take a major Core Update to finally see the algorithmic restriction lift on your core content?
Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Thanks in advance!

I have a customer now has a website and it has good organic traffic. Most of the traffic come from their brand name(the domain name is not same as their brand name). They just bought a new domain name which is same as their brand name. They have very few pages in the old domain name and about 600 backlinks. I am working with them to do content plan to increase their organic traffic through SEO. Their short term goal is to increase traffic of their website and they also want to use their new domain because it is same as their brand.

There are two ways:

1. Do SEO on the current domain and do domain migration in the future. It is easier to get traffic increase because it has good authority and traffic. But it will have bigger side effect if migrate to new domain in the future.
2. Do domain migration using 301 first and do content in the new domain right now. Because it need time for google to migrate domain authority to new domain, traffic increase will be slower on the new domain in short time.

Which way do you suggest?

My client is obsessed with CWV and I can't say I'm too convinced.

Yes - compress images, minify CSS/JS and try your best to remove unused JavaScript (place at the footer etc etc) - but my overall point - is the juice worth the squeeze especially in 2026?

Surely CDN's and edge caching etc has taken care of a lot of latency issues?

My overall point here is that I'd rather place the Tech towards entity-relationship improvements over improving load speed for 0.002 seconds for a skinny site of 200 URLs that gets like 200 visits a day.

You get my point on this?

I have had technical SEO issues on my website for the past 3 months and I am unable to fix them. My main issues: bad FCP, LCP, page speed, rendering issues, pagination issues.

I tried a lot of optimisations but still results are not improving. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong or where to focus my efforts. Has anyone experienced similar problems?

I would appreciate any advice on how to diagnose and fix these. Here are some tools, techniques and steps I would recommend to improve your Core Web Vitals and overall technical SEO performance:

Thanks for your help in advance.

I’ve noticed a pattern on a lot of SEO teams, especially at larger companies. Someone opens Search Console, sees a trend, and immediately starts making strategic decisions like Google isn’t crawling enough or this section lost visibility.

Search Console is not a complete view of what’s happening.

Don’t get me wrong it’s one of the most valuable SEO tools we have but I’ve seen teams treat GSC as if it’s a perfect representation of Google’s behavior when it’s really just a sample of the bigger picture.

I’ve worked on sites where Search Console suggested Googlebot wasn’t crawling certain areas much.

Server logs showed a complete different story.
Googlebot was hitting those sections thousands of times per day it just wasn’t obvious from the GSC reports.

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.

I've been working on increasing my website's Domain Authority and have created hundreds of backlinks over the past month, many from websites with high DA. However, my DA hasn't moved at all and seems completely stuck.

I'm wondering what I might be doing wrong. Do backlinks take longer to impact DA, or are there other factors that influence it? What strategies have worked for you when your DA stopped growing?

Any advice would be appreciated.