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.

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.

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.

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.