Interesting - is this the end of Reddit's blanket ranking upgrade?

Hi all, I run my own one man local service business and handle a lot of the SEO, well try to handle it.

Anyway, I made sure to reply to my reviews on the GBP as they came in. Most were very basic like, “Thanks [name], I was happy to help.” Lately I’ve added a location name in the reply but mostly just stuck to my standard reply.

Today all of my replies are no longer there. Maybe a glitch, not sure. Just wondering if this type of issue happens some times and I just need to get over and reply again to each review, or whether I should actively contact Google and see what’s up? My experience with contacting Google in the past when a legit review was removed and an illegitimate review was permitted to stay leaves me thinking Google with just go ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

TLDR: My replies to GBP reviews are gone. should I just sit back and wait, or should I reach out to Google and where would contact info be if yes?

I previously worked at a marketing agency as an SEO Strategist, where I managed writers, developers, and SEO assistants. I took a career break last year and I'm now returning as a solo freelancer.

I've just finished a discovery call with a potential client. They liked my proposal, and our closing call is tomorrow.

The engagement is a monthly SEO retainer (strategy, Local SEO, technical SEO, reporting, content planning, etc.).

My question is about the first invoice.

From what I've researched, charging the first month 100% upfront seems to be standard practice for retainers. However, since this is our first engagement and we're still building trust, I'm wondering if it would be smarter to do 50% upfront and 50% at the end of the first month, then move to 100% upfront for future months.

My thinking is that it reduces the client's perceived risk without significantly increasing mine.

For those of you who run SEO or consulting retainers:

• What payment structure do you use for new clients?
• How would you price a scope like this?
• If your scope is different, I'd still love to hear what your retainer includes and how you structure your pricing so I can compare it against mine.

Google reported its earnings today, its Q2 2026 earnings report showed search ad revenues up by 14.5% at $81.6 billion and overall revenue was up 24% at $119.8 billion. As you know, I specifically like to dig in as best as I can on the search ad revenue side to see how Google Ads has performed.

Google's ad revenue was up again year-over-year, with an increase of 14.5%, and overall revenue is also up 24%. This is Google's biggest quarter ever in terms of overall revenue. Google's search revenue grew 17% to $63.3 billion, up from about $54.2 billion a year ago, which is roughly in-line with a $63.4 billion estimate from StreetAccount. Sundar Pichai said, "Our momentum starts with Search, where people are adopting one seamless search experience across AI Overviews and AI Mode. We saw 17% revenue growth in Search and Other. And YouTube Ads grew 13%."

If you want to compare Q2 2026 to Q1 2026, you will see ad revenue was up 5.6%, overall revenue was down 9% and profit was up 2.7%.

Thanks u/rustybrick

​

Hi everyone,

I’ve been in SEO since 2019. I started by building and ranking my own websites, eventually scaling 2 to 3 of them to over 1 million monthly visitors.

Later, I transitioned into corporate SEO. Honestly, my main takeaway from corporate work so far has been learning to build polished reports. The real, high-impact technical and strategic SEO knowledge that helped me clear every interview still comes from hands-on experience building and growing my own sites. hence till now nothing extraordinary i have leant from corporate

Now, i want to do something extraordinary and really like working at some big companies with huge pages, massive data base looks so interesting to me (claude, apple, bank of america, top fashion brands, famous innovating products etc) so i want to know from people who have experienced this, what you did in your career to reach at big companies

Standing Out: What specific achievements or strategies helped you stand out in the competitive SEO job market to land your role?

Skill Set: What advanced skills (e.g., Python, SQL, advanced data analysis, automation, programmatics) did you acquire that proved most valuable?

Day-to-Day Operations: What does enterprise SEO actually look like at scale when managing massive datasets and working across cross-functional engineering/product teams?

I know this is a niche topic, but I’d deeply appreciate any advice, experiences, or insights people here can share

Hi all, 

I have a question regarding a series of posts that I have written on my blog, and it appears that some of them are not indexed but the rest are. 

I run a travel Blog with around 200 posts, of which around 100 are 'daily diary' entries where I posted one seperate blog post for each day during our 100 day sabbatical. The posts varied in length and detail but generally detailed what we did each day and also included lots of photos, etc. 

All of these diary entries are showing in GSC as either 'crawled - currently not indexed' or 'Discovered - currently not indexed'

My question is why could this be happening? All of my other posts on the blog seem to be indexing fine. I'm wondering if because I posted so many blog posts one day after the other that perhaps google thinks they are spam? Could it be the naming convention for example, "RTW Trip Day #100: Vineyards, Tapas and Swimming at Onetangi Beach"? Every post has the same format.

I'm hoping that someone might be able to give me reasons as to why this might be happening and more importantly what I can do about it? 

Thanks in advance

so i am a really small fish guy that tries to make it online. my numbers are really not impressive and i guess (well i think) in this sub there are really big guys with big numbers. but i still want to share a really happy story for me to encourage other makers like me to just keep going with seo.

i offer software. and because my sales numbers are not that big i basically write every buyer after a few days if everything worked out correct and if there is something missing. usually i get no answers lol. but one guy answered me and was super happy with the product. and i asked him if i could put his answer basically on my website lol. he agreed and even offered a video review (he told me in the email that he is also a solo entreprenuer and that he knows how important these things are). perfect. he send me the video 2 hours ago. honestly made me a little bit a tear in my eye and my wife told me i should find out where he lives so she could hug him lol.

back to seo. the interesting part in terms of seo was that he told in the video he found my software because chatgpt suggested it to him lol. i did not optimize for geo or whatever. just optimized for seo. and yeah i followed u/weblinkr advices and YES build some backlinks to my site. in my case there were a lot of opportunities to just "suggest" my tool to official sites and they got through. these were mainly wiki pages that got "good" clicks.

its a first timer for me. i still dont "know" what i am doing but i guess i am getting closer to it. just wanted to share my little win and hope you guys also win.

cheers.

I have noticed something strange that I cannot explain and that is happening since about three months. My blog does not get any clicks any more. I mean literally zero. Before there was an upward trend and clicks were finally going up.

AI was there before, too. So it seems unlikely that this alone is the reason. Is something wrong with the Google Search Console?

Hi team, I'm just curious to understand when building new websites, how many pages, posts etc is too much for new domains?

10/50/500?

I'm getting the sense that publishing too much content and without it ranking isn't good for websites. I guess the answer would be that it depends, but any rough guideline would be appreciated.

Can someone guide me about web 2.0 and how to get authentic sites of web 2.0 that are free to post ?

I’m working on a real estate website in India and I’m trying to grow its organic traffic, but my budget is very limited.

Most SEO advice I see talks about buying backlinks, doing PR campaigns, guest posts, or other paid link-building methods. The problem is that I can’t afford to do that regularly.

So my question is:

Is it realistically possible to grow organic visits and eventually rank on the 1st page (or even #1) for competitive real estate keywords in India using only free/organic methods?

For example, by focusing on:

- High-quality property pages

- Local SEO

- Area-wise content

- Google Business Profile

- Internal linking

- Technical SEO

Consistent content publishing

Can a smaller real estate website actually beat established competitors organically, or is paid link acquisition basically unavoidable in the Indian real estate niche?

what's everybody's opinion on service business using paper lead services or SEO services charging per lead?

in the past I've used SEO with mixed results so I'm looking into this kind for my local service business?

I've just launched a new SaaS and am producing new pages that target keywords relevant to our niche. It's a mix of blog-style and industry FAQ style pages. I'm doing 10 a week.

But our web app has a UGC/content production element to it. (Basically, users can upload PDFs + videos) and launch on public links (e.g. our-app/djfhdgfgd).

We were trying to set these up so that Google indexes them.

My main question for the community is this:

What's a good rule of thumb in terms of new pages a week or month?
Does Google punish you for having too many new pages all at once?
Does Google even facilitate this?

Lately I have been getting queries like this. I do feel they are LLMs, but why are they excluding Social media platforms?

"<keyWord>" -site:reddit.com -site:twitter.com -site:x.com -site:wykop.pl -site:tripadvisor.com -site:youtube.com -site:yelp.com -site:booking.com -site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com -site:tiktok.com

Hi everyone,

I'm helping a relative with their SEO and content, and I'm trying to figure out the best approach to building backlinks.

On one hand, the general consensus is that you shouldn't buy links and that it can harm your rankings. But on the other hand, their direct competitors have 500-1,000 backlinks, while we only have 3.

I don't think it's realistic to start cold emailing websites for links, as the response rate is usually extremely low.

So, what is the right way to go about this today? How can I realistically acquire at least 5-10 quality links a month for this site?

I’m auditing the indexing problems on an ecommerce site, and would appreciate a second opinion from people who have handled large URL consolidations.

The Google Search Console Pages report currently shows:

• 6,120 crawled, currently not indexed
• 519 discovered, currently not indexed
• 182 404s
• 115 duplicates with no user-selected canonical
• 27 cases where Google chose a different canonical
• 3 server errors
• 3,451 URLs blocked by robots.txt
• 236 alternate pages with a canonical declared elsewhere
• 52 redirecting URLs

The main issue seems to be that several generations of the catalog URL structure are still accessible at the same time.

Examples include:

• /pl/p/{product-name}/{id}
• /en_US/producer/{brand}/{id}
• /artykuly-pismienne/…
• /artykuly-pismiennicze/…
• /akcesoria-pismienne/…
• /akcesoria-pismiennicze/…
• /writting-instruments/…
• /accessories/…

Many products, categories and brand pages appear under multiple URL structures. Up to 6,781 of the 6,966 URLs requiring action fall within these affected URL families.

My approach is:

1. Choose one final URL structure for each language.
2. Build redirects at entity level using product, category and brand IDs;
3. Redirect each legacy URL directly to its exact equivalent.
4. Leave URLs without a legitimate equivalent as 404 or 410 rather than redirecting them to a generic category.
5. Update internal links, canonicals and XML sitemaps in the same deployment.
6. Add self-referencing canonicals to all indexable final URLs.
7. Add hreflang between Polish and English equivalents.

There is also a spelling decision to make:

/writting-instruments/

The typo appears in at least 240 sampled excluded URLs and is used in the current navigation. I’m thinking whether to correct it to:

/writing-instruments/

during the same consolidation, or retain it temporarily to reduce migration scope. If corrected, all old URLs would redirect directly to the correctly spelled final destination, without passing through the typo'ed URL(s).

Another area I still need to investigate is the 236 “alternate page with proper canonical” URLs. Some appear to be Polish and English versions of the same pages, so I’m planning to review a stratified sample and check whether:

• same-language duplicate variants are canonicalized correctly;
• legacy URLs should be redirected instead;
• Polish pages are incorrectly canonicalizing to English pages;
• translations lack self-canonicals or hreflang.

The site also has 3,451 faceted-navigation URLs blocked through robots.txt. I think the best way is to retain that setup and reduce the number of crawlable internal links rather than switch everything to noindex, since Google would need to crawl those URLs.

My main questions:

1. Is this level of URL fragmentation enough to explain most of the “crawled, currently not indexed” volume, or would you expect another issue alongside it?
2. Would you consolidate the legacy structures, fix the English spelling and update canonicals, internal links and sitemaps in one coordinated deployment?
3. Would you separate the spelling correction into a later migration if the typoed URLs already have traffic or backlinks?
4. For translated PL/EN pages, would you always use self-canonicals plus hreflang, assuming the main content is correctly translated?
5. Are there any major risks or validation steps I’m missing before generating the redirect map?

I’d appreciate feedback from anyone who has consolidated several generations of ecommerce URLs without causing redirect chains, soft 404s or a temporary drop in indexing

Thanks

Seeing a ton of different info on this. I have a guy who does dumpster rental and no public address - wondering if i should have him add his home address (where he does legitimately run the business out of right now) or will he get penalized? Also he's from a town in the middle of nowhere in TN if that matters at all

no hedging, no "it depends." if your site doesn't have topical authority, your link budget is a donation.

i've been doing SEO for 7+ years, agency clients, my own projects, legal, medical, saas. the pattern over the last 2 years is impossible to ignore: sites with deep, connected topical coverage rank and get cited by AI systems with mediocre link profiles. sites with strong DR and shallow content get filtered out of both classic SERPs and AI answers.

three things i keep seeing:

1. AI Overviews and LLM citations pull from sources that cover a topic completely, not from sources with the most referring domains. i've watched a DR 20 site with a full semantic content network get cited over DR 70 competitors repeatedly.
2. links amplify what already exists. if your content graph has holes, links amplify the holes. you rank for the head term for 3 weeks, then settle back because the site doesn't answer the follow-up questions users and engines both have.
3. the order of operations matters more than the budget. topical map first, full coverage second, internal linking third, external links last. most agencies sell this list in reverse because links are the easiest line item to invoice.

if you have 5k to spend this quarter, spend 4k closing content gaps and 1k on links, not the other way around. you will hate this advice if you sell links. that's fine, both reactions grow the right audience.

happy to go deeper on how i build topical maps if anyone wants, but the core claim stands: authority is earned in the content graph now, links just confirm it.

I manage a bilingual French and English website.

The French homepage and English homepage use separate URLs, reciprocal hreflang tags, and self-referencing canonicals. The French page also uses lang="fr" and the English page uses lang="en".

However, when users search for the brand from France, Google often displays the English version instead of the French version.

The brand name itself is in English, so I understand that this may influence how Google interprets the query. However, our main audience is French-speaking, and we want French-speaking users to land on the French website by default.

Is this normal behavior for a brand name written in English, or should Google still prioritize the French version based on the user’s language and location?

Has anyone dealt with a similar issue?

hello guys, I am working as an SEO for a new site and the client want the projection for the SEO KPIs. Its a SaaS based project, where we will be doing 30 blog posts per months targeting long tail and low KD keywords. Also, we will be doing outreach campaigns for backlink opportunities. However, i dont have a clear idea on the projection of SEO KPIs like impression,cliks,and CTR after 3 months. how should i estimate that??

Hey everyone, could use some advice from people who've been through this.

I built a free Chrome extension a few months back (it helps Salesforce users manage their file uploads/downloads, a pretty niche B2B tool). Right now it only lives on the Chrome Web Store, no dedicated website. It's picked up a decent number of installs organically just from the store listing.

Here's my situation: I'm planning to roll out some premium features in the next few months (still free core functionality, but paid tier for power users). Before I do that, I'm trying to figure out the right sequencing.

A few things I'm stuck on:

1. Should the website come before or after the paid features launch? Part of me thinks I should build it now so I have time to rank organically before I actually need it to convert people to paid plans. Another part of me thinks I'm wasting time building a site nobody will find yet.
2. What should the website actually do that the Chrome Web Store listing doesn't already do? Trying to figure out if it's just for SEO/organic discovery, or if it needs its own value prop (docs, changelog, comparison pages vs competitors, etc.)
3. For a tool that lives inside Chrome Web Store, does a website even move the needle on installs? Or is it more about owning the funnel for the future paid stuff (email capture, upgrade prompts, billing) since the Web Store won't let me do that natively.
4. Anyone gone from free-only extension to freemium and can share what your website/SEO strategy looked like during that transition?

Not looking for a generic "yes build a website" answer, more interested in the sequencing and what actually mattered when you did this.

Which is best to start in 2026. Advice from real agency owners is much appreciated.

So I own Web and SEO agency. So far I have been dealing with Client from my own country. First time I am going to connect on Zoom call with client from USA who wants a website and more importantly SEO for next 6 months. I sent him a proposal/audit already with things like how the market he is planning to enter is doing now, competitor analysis like who they are, how they are doing SEO wise, what we need to do, cost and timeline etc. He liked it and proposed a call.

I know my craft very well.. but quite confused how to present all this on the call. Maybe I am bit overthinking. so my question to all folks here is

1. What you usually do when you have a meeting with new client about Website and SEO?
   
2. Any other tips, advise you would want to share with me.

Thanks for your help in advance.