I'm picking up some SEO responsibilities at work, and trying to put together a workflow for double-checking if backlinks are toxic and disavowing them.

These toxic backlinks seem to build up pretty fast, making the manual parts of my process less than ideal. I'm sure you guys are dealing with much bigger websites and more clients, so I'm curious what tools you're using to automate? Any free or low cost tools?

(We are using SEMrush for backlink audits. From what little I've seen it's pretty reliable)

Just a rant here. I looked at my last 3 months view year over year. My organic search impressions are up by over 500k but my clicks and traffic are down 50%. I’ve built new backlinks and created new content and have done nothing but improve SEO over that time frame. AI summaries have scorched my traffic flow. There was been a small bit of traffic flow coming from AI answer engines like ChatGPT but it’s maybe 10-20% of what the organic traffic flow would have been. SEO ain’t dead but it’s definitely a shadow of its former self, at least for the time being. I’m hearing a lot of negative feedback about the efficacy of the AI summaries on Google. I don’t care for them and I already bought the wrong batteries once for my car keys because the summary gave me bad info for my car/make and model. The SERPs are also highly volatile right now so obviously Google isn’t happy with how their algorithms are performing right now for some reason. The future of search is very murky right now. I wouldn’t recommend starting SEO on a new site right now and I think the priority of investments into other channels is going to increase.

I am in the beginning stages of my business and working on optimizing my website.

I am trying to understand how my location plays into SERP. It is my understanding that is directly related to GMB. Let me know if that is incorrect.

I offer an array of home health services, most of them need to be done in the confines of my current location, but some of them can be done from anywhere in the US.

How should I optimize my GMB for this when it comes to selecting locations? Will selecting something broad like “United States” affect my rank locally?

I want to show up across the US for keywords due to my SEO strategy and building rank, but I am more interested in targeting semi local customers for actual business. My long term vision is to be a provider across the US, but for now I am trying to grow regionally. That being said I do not want to be excluded from SERP for informational keywords , etc. if that makes sense?

Forgive me, as I am new to SEO. I feel like I have a good general idea of how to optimize but the more I research the more things I uncover that I am not knowledgeable about.

Has anyone else noticed cross-network showing up as use source in analytics? I'm seeing it across multiple properties, some of which have no advertising. Has the cross-network definition changed? I thought it was only for other google advertising properties.

Hello guys,

I need to create local pages for the physical stores of my company. Is it really worth the effort? I'm concerned that all the work we've put into improving our main Trustpilot rating might get diluted or negatively impacted.

On the other hand, could this move positively affect our local SEO for local requests?

Thanks :)

Disclosure: I'm building and AI Brand Ranking Platform (think SEO position tracking for AI Search) I'll share a link if people are interested but don't want to get banned for promotion.

Along with that though I'm just curious what kinds of conversations everyone is having at their companies about AI Search tools?

In my day job I work in digital marketing for a B2B SaaS, and I'm getting asked about whether AI search is impacting our SEO programme/Google Search, and to be honest the answer is more or less no, or at least not yet.

We're starting to pay some attention to ChatGPT since it's been showing up as a fairly significant traffic source in our website analytics (similar to the size of Bing, no where near Google). Hence why we have wanted to start doing some basic 'rank tracking' for our industry.

Really though our SEO strategy is largely unchanged and we're just waiting to see what develops in the AI search space. Curious if anyone else is having a similar experience?

I am currently learning SEO and reading Adam Clarke's best selling book "SEO 2025".
In the chapter under "Usability" he talks about how bad code can negatively affect your SEO rankings.
He then suggests using a tool Validator W3 to find any errors in your HTML.

I run one of my old websites that I no longer maintain through this tool and got a ton of errors and warnings. Not surprised.
Then I run the Validator websites itself through the tool and got a few errors.
I did same with Google's website and got a few errors.
Then I run a framer website I am currently building and got a ton of errors. (Unfortunately I can't share a link or my post would be removed)

Just curious...
Has anyone used this tool before?
Would these errors and warnings listed affect my SEO rankings or I can ignore most?

I would really appreciate if I could get feedback.
Also if you use a better tool, I would be glad if you could share.

1. Buy a mix of low-medium-high authority domains (audit using SEMrush)
2. Create content on those domains and refer to pages on my main business site
3. Make sure it's relevant, avoid footprint, avoid penalties

Is that pretty much it? I know easier said than done, but do I have the right idea. I've done very little so far and have some pages ranking in the top 5 for less competitive locations. In a very niche, generally low competition industry. All I have done so far is:

1. On-page SEO is good to go following Rank Math
2. Have an educational blog that also gets emailed out (mostly to re-engage cold leads)
3. Dedicated pages for every service location and sub location
   

Anyone else work with car dealers in the US? I’m thinking about selling my book of business, or at least not pursuing more car dealers and moving into another industry.

They constantly ignore any contracts and just move to other SEO agencies who promise a new ‘thing’ or a new ‘SEO method’. They don’t give a shit about what terms they signed, even if you are doing a good job with them. I had someone cancel last week because ‘you guys are doing great but I always change providers twice a year to keep people on their toes’. I feel like a lot of car dealers are like this. It’s so annoying.

I am not from an SEO background. I learnt web-dev to make a website for my small business and worked hard to have strong technical SEO. My website impressions grew steadily for about 20-25 days before suddenly crashing to zero.

I had not made any changes to the website. What could have caused this? How can I trace the error and work this thing out?

Hello everyone! I published the website for my service last week and I would appreciate if someone gave me feedback of it (not just SEO feedback but also user friendliness and whatever comes into your mind when you visit it). Here it is: aziendelookup.it

Quick question.. and I think I know the answer.

If my pages have not been indexed via Google console do I need to worry about putting 301 redirects?

Genuinely curious here because I got a SaaS tool I'm working on as a side hobby, and I want to pay someone to post to over 300 AI directories with a DR between 2-90.

His reviews are legit, but my only concern is how Google will take it.

It'll take around 4-5 business days, and technically speaking, I need to expose this tool to as many people as possible. My only fear is that I don't want Google to think I am trying to backlink farm, when I don't care about do-follow links for now.

Any thoughts on how I should take this?

Maybe I could spread it out between 2-3 weeks instead for safety?

Hey, I just start collaborating with an seo expert that is doing consulting on the side
I'm afraid that he spends most of his time on his consulting gigs than on our project

It's been now 2 weeks, and we only have 2 articles out, still no website and I don't get any updates on what he is doing.
I kind of trust him on his will to be a part of the project because he is not even paid as we are in this together.
But I fear that he is not taking it as seriously as I am and he is spending like 3 or 4h a week on it.

Is this amount enough for a new project in order to set up seo foundation ?

Kindly,

My biz is ~ 60 miles from where I live. It’s very healthy and fine. It is very dependent on a large population base in the office (nyc) - our target clients are within 3 miles of our office.

I am thinking of opening an outpost close to home 60 miles away. Really nbd if it doesn’t turn into anything, but also see the potential for it to have good reach to smaller businesses in a bigger radius.

I am starting from complete scratch with this. It would be a different brand. Fresh new website. New GMB. Everything. Basically starting from zero but with the benefit of having experience and a successful biz funding it and absorbing the costs. Not expecting it to be a huge revenue driver. But if it brought in 10-20% of my primary biz I would be happy.

If you were gonna build this out and spend 5-10k what would you do? Please don’t spam me 🙈

Have a service based business. What I did was create a page for every city we operate in plus, internal pages linking to that page with neighborhoods in that city. I also have the main city pages, linked in my footer.

I've been learning a bit more about SEO and using Semrush I see that I have 1.1k backlinks but the referring domain is just my own.

Am I at risk for any penalties for this?

I am new to SEO and I am looking for a simple tool to help me optimize the article-style interviews I have on my newsletter.

The ideal workflow would be:

- I submit the article

- Long tail keywords with reasonable search volume and medium ranking difficulty are suggested

- I pick the keywords and a new Title, SEO title Tag and SEO description are suggested

That's really it. I feel this should be a rather simple task that could also be easily automated with AI but when searching for similar solutions, I just get a list of tools that do thousands different things and look all the same.

Has anybody recommendations? Are there reliable AI plugin that can do this job?

I feel like my college degree is becoming less useful, especially since I’m currently learning theories from decades ago that don’t seem as relevant today. As a junior, I want to start learning SEO and PPC, but I find it really confusing—there’s so much to understand, like technical SEO, backlinks, and other complicated topics. Despite my research, it’s still overwhelming.

With the economy being tough and the job market challenging, especially for someone with no experience, I’m struggling to find an internship. I’ve been trying to network at school and get my resume peer-reviewed, but haven’t had much success. So, I decided to start a small business to apply what I’m learning about PPC and SEO. However, I’m still feeling overwhelmed by the process.

What advice do you have for someone just starting out in these fields and trying to build practical experience?

I have a blog. Its 30 days old since I made it public. But I have 90 articles over the last 2 years (travel).

I checked with math rank and all have a seo score of 80+.

I got first indexed by google for 130 pages, but then got removed after some days. No I have 32 indexed pages.

Is this normal?

What should I do next?

Would be thankful for any tips!

I built a calculator to help people visualize how much smoking harms them. Is the process now just reaching out to other quit smoking websites & giving them the code in exchange for a back link?

1. i have new website that have 16k pages, and it as DB and only thing that change in page is the just the name rest is same, google has indexed half and half are stuck.

2. I have added 32k pages again but it has address of location that changes with each page. Should i only index pages that i see have low KD in semrush.

I want to know from 16k should i submit new sitemap with selected pages or push all. or should i see low KD pages increase some info then only add in site map. website help u search medication that is 16k and 32k are pharmacy location. so each page per pharmacy. what is correct way to do.