I run my own business and have been trying to improve our SEO, but I’ve had a hard time working with agencies and freelancers. It feels difficult to know who actually knows what they’re doing, who can be trusted, and who is just making promises to get paid.

I’m looking for someone experienced in SEO who would be open to mentoring me and helping me better understand what I should be focusing on, how to judge whether the work is being done correctly, and how to avoid wasting money.

I’d also be happy to exchange services, knowledge, or help with something I’m experienced in. I run an established online business, so I may be able to offer value in areas like business operations, sales, software, or general entrepreneurship.

I’m not expecting anyone to work for free. I’m mainly looking for a genuine relationship where we can help each other, rather than another typical agency pitch.
Feel free to message me if this sounds like something you’d be interested in.

I am trying to use the official Google Indexing API to index some job postings. I can successfully make the indexing requests and the API returns a 200 status code, but when I check the URLs in Google Search Console, their status never changes.

I read in the documentation that a form needs to be filled out to increase the API usage quota; is that form also required just to use the API normally?

All my job pages use SSR; I’ve tested them all on PageSpeed Insights and they all scored 100%. I’ve also verified that Google recognizes them as job pages—which it does—and the JSON-LD shows no issues.

I was checking in Google Search Console and troubleshooting why half my Shopify store pages had not been indexed, just in case there was an issue. The site was newly launched just a month ago, and I know these things take time, but I began checking a few URLs in schema.org, after finding a recommendation to do so online - which returned this result for the few URLs I checked:

"The URL is unreachable. Ensure robots.txt is accessible and the server is responding with a 200 status code."

AFAIK, the robots.txt file in Shopify is built in and auto-generated and accessible from the get-go. The vast majority of the pages not indexed are actual product pages, but some of the product pages have been indexed and are being served (I checked with a "site:....." search on Google)

The URLs in question are loading fine; it's not like they're blocked. I checked the robots.txt file, and products haven't been blocked either. If it was an issue with hosting, I'd assume that the other few products that had been indexed wouldn't have been.

Is this a common issue with Shopify or otherwise? Any thoughts?

Many thanks.

This is a hypothesis I have although the more I look into it the more I'm starting to convince myself it's true.

We launched a redesign in 2023 and the SERPs have but bottom of page 8 terrible despite having a strong SERP value before that. To give you an idea how bad we've fallen, for all of our keywords visibility we had about 43% market share per SEM Rush, now we're at 0.57%

In terms of implementing 301s, we matched new to old URL structures as expected ensuring we had the most 1-to-1 match as possible. Everything else was sent to the home page to prevent a 4xx error.

However, I think we may have a double (or perhaps triple) redirect in place via WP plugin, .htaccess, and implementing a 301 redirect list on SiteGrounds.

On, .htaccess at least I have this snippet of code:

SetEnv PHPRC /home/customer/www/myrandomsite.com/public_html/php.ini
# Added to redirect old subdomain to new subfolder
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mx.my-random-site.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mx.my-random-site.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://myrandomsite.com/fr/$1 [L,R=301]

This was meant to ensure all old domain URLs, in case we missed any, go to the new URL. For redirect on sitegrounds, it's a semi-massive list of URLs on redirects settings on SiteGrounds.

The old URL with mx. as a subdomain is quite old. In theory, it should've already fallen off by now.

My main question is, is it safe to delete this snippet or the redirect list to ensure we're back to better SERP exposure?

I've been mapping out the edge SEO space (SearchPilot/Distilled ODN, RankScience, EdgeComet, Sloth) - reverse proxy sits in front of your site, injects/rewrites title tags, meta descriptions, JSON-LD, canonicals etc at the CDN level so changes ship without a dev deploy.

Trying to get a realistic picture from people who've actually dealt with the dev-dependency problem, not just vendor pages:

How long does a routine SEO fix (title tag, canonical, schema addition) actually take to ship at your org, from ticket to live

If you've used a proxy/edge tool for this, what actually broke or underperformed vs the pitch: reliability, cloaking concerns, cache staleness, something else

If you haven't adopted one, is it because you haven't needed it, tried it and bailed, or a trust issue with putting a third party in front of your whole site

Not selling anything, just trying to separate real friction from vendor marketing before I sink more time into this space.

Hey everyone,

I’m running into a baffling issue with a handful of important pages on my health-care site and wanted to see if anyone else has been hit by this recently, or if there's an ongoing algorithmic filter I missed.

Around the 6th–7th of this month, several key pages completely vanished from Google SERPs.

The weird part: Google Search Console shows them as "Indexed" with absolutely zero coverage errors, mobile usability issues, or indexing warnings. They are also indexing and performing completely normally on Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Here is everything I have already checked and verified:

Basic Tech Check: No noindex tags, robots.txt is clear, and XML sitemaps are updated/resubmitted.

Canonical Tags: Self-referencing canonicals are in place, and everything looks correct on the frontend.

Manual Actions: GSC "Security & Manual Actions" tab is completely green/clear.

Despite forcing a priority recrawl via GSC, they are still invisible in live Google search results—sometimes even when doing an exact site:URL search.

Since the technical basics are covered, I'm trying to figure out what Google-specific quality or algorithmic signals could cause a live, indexed page to be completely suppressed from the SERPs overnight.

Has anyone experienced a similar drop around early July?

Could this be a lag in GSC reporting a soft-404 or algorithmic quality filter?

Are there any advanced technical checks (like Google-selected vs. User-declared canonical mismatches) that I should dig into next?

Appreciate any insights or similar experiences!

Background: I've been a QA engineer for about 8 years, both manual and automation. I want to move toward SEO, ideally the technical side, and someone I know with 12+ years in the field agreed to train me properly instead of me piecing it together from Youtube.
The interesting part is how much overlaps with QA and how much doesn't. What he's had me do over the first weeks:

Read raw server logs to see which bots hit the site, how often, and what they fetch. Honestly this felt like log analysis during debugging, it clicked almost immediately
Crawling, rendering, indexing as a pipeline, and how AI crawlers (GPTBot etc) behave differently from Googlebot. The rendering part is basically the same mental model as testing JS-heavy apps
Redirects and canonicals. I expected these to be easy given my background and they were not. Canonicals took me two weeks to stop getting wrong
Search Console and GA4, separating branded from non branded queries. He treats analytics like a test report where most people only read the pass count
How AI answers (ChatGPT, AI Overviews) select which sites they cite. He says this is the biggest shift in the industry right now and spends a lot of time here
Local search, business profiles, maps, reviews

What he refuses to teach me yet: keyword tools, content calendars, domain authority. His position is that you earn those after you can diagnose a site the way a QA diagnoses a failing build, and that DA specifically is a vanity metric.
Question for people doing this professionally: does this order make sense in 2026? Every course starts with keyword research and content. He starts with what is effectively systems testing. It maps well to my skillset, but I can't tell if he's teaching me the industry or just his opinion of it. Also, is technical SEO a realistic direction for someone coming from QA, or do teams expect content skills first?

When we write posts for either our blogs, or documentations for any SAAS we generally internal link the articles, is there any consequences of linking too many articles in a single post? Like adding too many internal linking or outbound links? If you are already doing this then how you are managing it and keep the links updated with time as the relevance of the links or articles changes over time.

Hello. I hope it’s okay if I share my question here too !

Crawled - currently not indexed for almost 2 months.

Validation Started - Started: 5/29/26 and still nothing.

What is Google Search Console up to for the last couple of months or year or two? My site is completely removed from Google Search including the homepage. Bing on the other hand has been cruising it from the time I created the site.

What has changed about Google bots crawl or GSC in general that wasn't there over a year and before. Surely I used to get more clicks and stats from GSC, but this site is completely missing on Google.

Hi guys, I have WooCommerce store on WordPress. Product page is open normally in browser, everything works fine. But when I check it with SEO extension (status checker), it shows 503 (Service Unavailable) first, then 200 (OK) right after — like in screenshot.

If I just reload the page normally it's fine, no error. But the extension is catching this 503 somehow.

Site is using LiteSpeed Cache + Rank Math SEO. I don't understand what is causing this, is it cache problem, is it server problem, or is it normal thing that happens on every site?

Can someone explain what does this mean and is it something I need to fix or ignore? Thanks

Previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1u9d3gh/comment/otguydr/?screen_view_count=2

So I think around two to three weeks ago, I posted my Google Search Console, where it showed that I have had around 1.4k bot URLs. My website was hacked, and only 19 pages were indexed, so I didn't know what to do. I just posted it in the community so that people can suggest what I need to do. The good thing is that the solution I got from the community is really helped.

Currently, our Google Search Console has 1.26k bot URLs, but our 35 pages just got indexed. The number of bot URLs is now decreasing bit by bit, and the number of index pages is now increasing. I really wanted to thank the community for the solution that it provided. Thank you.

That worked for us. The following are the things we tried:

• We tried using the removals tab, which is in the Google Search Console.
• We tried updating the robots.txt file.
• We updated the sitemap.xml.
• URL inspection tab

The one thing that was most important and that I think brought us to where we are is that we use the URL inspection tab heavily. What we did was: whenever we posted a page or posted a blog, we went to Google Search Console, used the URL inspection tab, and also opened up that URL and clicked on Request Indexing. We did it for all of the pages that we have, and slowly, slowly, we did it every day. The result just happened, so I really wanted to thank the community for this. Thank you!

So i am hosting my project in cloudflare pages, and it shows "couldn't fetch". Is there any workaround for this? I am new to SEO and this is the first time iam trying to implement to my project.

Hi All,

I would like to ask about the drawbacks of the present SEO tools that you think need a solid solution. Something that even Claude is not able to do...!!

There are 3 main tools that most SEOs use: GSC, Ahrefs & SEMRush (excluding Screaming Frog, as it is solely for technical audit and not a full system for keyword research and all.)

What is the gap you think each tool has that needs to be solved?

If I am asked the same:

GSC:

• Historical data only goes back 16 months, and the API imposes a 50,000-row cap per site per search type, which can result in sampling that hides up to 90% of keywords and 67% of impression data. No proper AI Visibility data, at least for Google's own LLM, which I believe should be included, as people have to rely on costly tools like SEMRush & Ahrefs,

SEMRush:

• Doesn't have sufficient backlink data, to be frank. It will show you big numbers when doing competitor research, and you will hardly find any worth approaching, as it often shows the same resource for multiple backlinks. You will go further on the 2nd page and see sources with a declining authority score (below 40) & one more thing is a traffic discrepancy with GSC & GA4.

Ahref:

• Almost Google-level backlink data, more trustworthy and helpful. But one thing that I personally feel is missing is that the site audit is not up to the mark, and a major concern is credit-based plans. Add-on, Ahrefs traffic discrepancy to GSC.

And a few things I find commonly missing:

• Both Ahrefs and SEMrush show AI visibility based on mentions+citations for competitors, but they don't actually tell what exactly is working for them, and what you can do to compete there
• No tie to GA4 or conversion data, so you know you're mentioned but not whether it drove business.
• Neither of them feels up to the mark for the price they are charging. Both have their good and bad, and this makes people think they are entitled to both to perform specific tasks where they are best at. Not everyone is rich enough to afford both or even one, just for AI visibility or brand radar

What are your thoughts?

Looking for date confirmation more than advice.

On July 12 our Bing visibility dropped off a cliff in a single day. I thought it was a fluke, site is new, but it simply never recovered. No gradual decline just a single drop, one day.

Context that makes this weird:

• The section is about 2300 state salary pages built from BLS OWES May 2025 data. Real numbers, sourced and cited on page.
• Google unaffected, GSC holding steady and stable
• Site audits are clean before and after: valid schema, robots open, nothing manual. Rechecked this week with URL inspection API and index pages return PASS.
• Nothing I shipped that week touched Bing-facing anything.

My feeling is that this one-day cliff with GSC steady and a clean site is an index change or something on Bing's side. If you run a data-heavy or directory style site, check your BWT for July 12. Anyone else notice if they got hit the same date?

Please share charts / screenshots in comments.