Let's say you have a brand new domain and you've been given a task to build traffic in the next 6 months. The niche, business does not matter, and the basics like 'adding domain to Google search console' don't matter.

Tell me what are the first 3, high-priority things you'll implement.

i have tried a lot of stuff to rank my website, buying backlinks, hired several freelancer from fiverr for on-page and off-page SEO and nothing seems to be working. maybe the space am in is not rank-able (IPTV)

any suggetion??

Since the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, most small to medium-sized and independent publishers have lost over 90% of their website traffic.

Many have shared their stories on X, pointing out that some high-quality websites were unfairly impacted by the algorithm update.

Meanwhile, big brands have either maintained or increased their traffic, despite publishing low-quality content. Independent publishers producing excellent content have still experienced a 90% drop in traffic. This pattern suggests a bias in Google’s favor towards larger brands over smaller, independent publishers.

During this time, some so-called SEO professionals tried to convince independent publishers that Google was doing a great job and that these websites deserved to be penalized.

Then, in March 2024, the Core and Spam Update hit, further reducing traffic by over 98% for many sites.

From September 2023 to March 2024, in just six months, most small and independent websites were brought to the brink of extinction, with no recovery from the September 2023 Helpful Content Update.

Google's March 2024 search update stated that 40% of low-quality, unoriginal content would be removed from search results. At the same time, they introduced three new policies: Scaled Content Abuse, Expired Domain Abuse, and Site Reputation Abuse.

The Site Reputation Abuse policy is set to take effect on May 5, 2024, giving big brands two months to adjust their websites according to Google's spam policies.

My question is: why is Google giving big publishers a two-month advance warning, while small and independent publishers are immediately penalized?

If Google knows that wiping out 40% of websites and applying further penalties will result in a lack of content for certain queries, it suggests they don’t fully understand how their algorithm works.

When May 5 arrives and the Site Reputation Abuse policy is implemented, Google is likely to limit manual actions instead of taking algorithmic action—likely out of fear of penalizing big publishers. Once again, we see clear bias in favor of large brands.

Later, people began asking Google Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, on X when the algorithmic action would be applied. He became frustrated and responded, "We will announce when it is applied."

In August, Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable interviewed Google's Search Liaison and asked again why the action wasn’t algorithmic. Sullivan replied, "The reason we probably won’t have it any time in the near future is that we want to be exceedingly careful and thoughtful in how we do it. So that’s taking time, and for the moment, manual actions are the way to go."

So, my question to Danny is: why is Google being extra careful with algorithmic action for big publishers?

When you rolled out the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and the March 2024 Core Update, why weren’t you extra careful when penalizing small and independent, helpful websites?

Why is Google always targeting small and independent websites without considering all the parameters?

Google rolled out the August 2024 Core Update, and for the first time in nearly 11 months, about 20%-25% of websites saw slight traffic gains compared to pre-2023 levels.

However, after the rollout was complete, many publishers reported that those same gains disappeared, leaving their websites wiped out again.

My question is: why does this happen? One month, your website is considered helpful, and the next, it’s unhelpful—then it's helpful again, only to be deemed unhelpful once more.

It seems like Google's machine learning algorithm is either broken or out of control, and even Google’s engineers don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t think Google truly knows what constitutes helpful content.

In conclusion, if Google were to publicly admit it has lost control of its search algorithm, I would make more money shorting Alphabet's stock than blogging. However, I know Google will never admit that something is wrong with their algorithm, even though it's clear something is off.

As small publishers, we can never compete with Google because we have limited resources compared to big publishers, which is why Google always prioritizes big publishers over small ones.

If you’re thinking about a consult or hiring them, I’d recommend going somewhere else.

Literally anywhere else.

Our company had used them for SEO and advertising 6 years ago. I met with them 2 years ago to reevaluate if we wanted to use them again - we didn't. I received multiple emails even after stating we weren’t interested, to the point I had to block their domain. They then moved on to calling my personal phone (which I never gave them). In the beginning they would call every couple days but it has gotten to the point where they call everyday sometimes twice a day. I block every single phone number they call from. I can’t answer any unfamiliar numbers anymore because 99% of the time it's BrightEdge. This has been going on for TWO YEARS and at this point it's harassment.

Save yourself the headache and don’t give them your name or any kind of contact info.

In 2020, a completely different company from Forbes partnered with Forbes to run their SEO affiliate business. They created a new company, made it look like it’s part of Forbes (it’s not), and then went to town exploiting every last corner of Google. They refer to themselves as Forbes Advisor publicly but the official entity is Forbes Marketplace.

Now, Google hit that company under the site reputation abuse policy.

I have been blogging for last 15 years, tech/programming how-to niche, as a developer whenever I get stuck in a day to day task and I crack it - I write an article, over the years collected over 2500 of them.

Used to get 15k traffic per day and made just a small $10/$20 a day with Adsense (just 2/3 ads)! But now Google don't care even if you provide a good human written content - all that matters now is reddit and other such forums.

I still write blogs because that is my passion but its seems like I am writing for a graveyard as Google is killing the traffic with every damn (un)helpful core update!

Is there any hope left for Tech Bloggers?

What tools do you guys use to do SEO audits on a site for keywords, rankings, etc?

Thanks,

I'm reaching out to the community to gather insights on effective SEO strategies for this year. As someone looking to improve my website's visibility and organic traffic, I'm curious:

• What specific SEO tactics have you implemented that yielded noticeable results?
• Have you focused more on on-page optimization, link building, or content marketing?
• How have you adapted your strategies to keep up with changing algorithms?

I'm looking for real-world examples and any tips you can share to help navigate the SEO landscape in 2024. Thank you in advance for your insights!

Hey folks!

Today I hired a girl from Fiverr to handle YouTube SEO for one of my client's projects for my video marketing agency. She’s from Ukraine, and surprisingly, she completed the SEO within one hour of starting. 😳

I know about tools like VidiQ and TubeBuddy for optimizing YouTube channels, but can these tools or others really get such quick results? Are those tools legitimate? Do they actually work?

Here are my beginner questions:

• Can YouTube SEO really be done in such a short time?
• Is she using some secret tool or strategy that I’m unaware of?
• How can I verify that the SEO work she did is actually good? Are there any tools to check this?

I’m new to SEO, and this seemed almost too good to be true. Any advice from experienced marketers or YouTube creators would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!

Suggest some good youtube channels and some block posts to get new updates on SEO

Glenn Gabe showed on X saying, "not sure if this is related to the spam policy documentation update yesterday (and possible manual actions coming), or if it's tied to the algorithmic tremors we have seen since the August core update completed, but Forbes Advisor is dropping heavily as of yesterday. 1.7M queries have dropped in rank (or are lost). Again, I have no idea if this is a manual action or algorithmic, but very interesting to see timing-wise."

Sources:

seroundtable. com/google-hit-forbes-advisor-38147.html

x. com/glenngabe/status/1840381881507856396

I have a site with 15k long-form articles, 5k of which don't get traffic anymore. What's best practice for dealing with these? Rewriting is not an option.

Hey guys,

I wanted to talk about something I don’t see getting enough attention but has (several times over) brought me a boost in results: content pruning.

Although it’s not the ‘sexiest’ part of SEO, but trust me—it’s effective and can make a massive difference, especially if you’ve got a lot of content that’s been hanging around for years.

What is Content Pruning?

Content pruning is exactly what it sounds like: going through your existing content and trimming away (or improving) the stuff that’s not performing.

You’re essentially cutting out the old, irrelevant, and underperforming pages that aren’t helping you rank—or worse, dragging down your site as a whole.

But this isn’t just about deleting a bunch of old blog posts. It’s a strategic process where you evaluate what content is worth keeping, improving, merging, or cutting altogether.

Why Prune Your Content?

Here’s the thing: Google rewards quality over quantity. If your site is bloated with outdated, irrelevant, or duplicate content, that’s gonna hurt your SEO efforts. Every page on your site is competing for Google’s attention, and if half of those pages aren’t adding value, they’re essentially diluting the power of the good stuff.

More pages = more chances for low-quality content to harm your rankings. It’s also worth mentioning that pruning can improve your site’s crawl efficiency, meaning Googlebot can focus on indexing the content that actually matters.

How to Implement Content Pruning: Step-by-Step

Here’s a process I follow when pruning a client’s website. It’s actionable, measurable, and—most importantly—gets results.

1. Audit Your Existing Content

Start by doing a complete content audit. Tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, or even Ahrefs are great for this. The goal is to identify all the pages on your site and their performance metrics (traffic, rankings, backlinks, etc.).

Look at the following:

• Pages with zero or very low traffic over the past 6-12 months.
• Content that ranks for irrelevant or low-value keywords.
• Pages with thin content (i.e., not providing enough value or depth).
• Outdated posts that are no longer accurate or useful (think old news, obsolete stats, irrelevant services).

Export everything into a spreadsheet so you can start analyzing it.

1. Categorize Your Content

Now that you have your content audit, categorize your content into three buckets:

• Keep: High-performing pages that are still relevant. These are your MVPs—you don’t touch them unless it’s to optimize further.
• Improve: Posts or pages that have some value but need a refresh. Maybe it’s outdated, maybe the keyword strategy needs adjusting, or maybe it just needs more content depth.
• Remove/Redirect: Low-value content that’s either irrelevant or actively hurting your rankings.

1. Improve & Consolidate

For the content in the “Improve” category, go through and optimize. Some ideas for improving content:

• Update statistics, examples, or case studies that are no longer accurate.
• Add more content to thin articles—longer content often performs better (but only if it’s relevant).
• Re-optimize for keywords: If a piece is ranking for a less-than-ideal keyword, adjust the content to target better, higher-value terms.
• Consolidate: If you have multiple posts on the same or similar topics, consider merging them into one comprehensive post. Use 301 redirects to point the old URLs to the new one, so you don’t lose any link juice.

1. Remove Low-Value Content

For content that’s past its prime and no longer useful, don’t be afraid to cut it. Deleting isn’t always the best option—you can 301 redirect these pages to more relevant content to preserve any backlinks or SEO value they still carry.

Pro Tip: If you have content that’s no longer relevant but you don’t want to delete it (e.g., an outdated service or product), consider deindexing it by using a noindex tag. This keeps it on your site for reference but removes it from Google’s index so it doesn’t hurt your rankings.

1. Measure the Impact

Once you’ve pruned your content, keep a close eye on your rankings, organic traffic, and crawl stats. Usually, within a few weeks or months, you’ll start seeing an improvement in keyword rankings and overall traffic. Use Google Analyticsand Search Console to track this. Remember, content pruning is not a one-time thing. It’s a continuous process. Every six months or so, revisit your content and see if there’s anything new that needs attention.

TL;DR: Clean Up Your Content for Better SEO If you’ve been putting off content pruning, now’s the time to do it. It’s a simple but powerful strategy to improve your site’s overall quality, ranking potential, and user experience. Start by auditing your site, categorizing your content, and deciding what to keep, improve, or remove. The results are well worth the effort.

Hope this helps!

I see a lot of posts about SEO every day. While some of these posts are useful for us, some are quite irrelevant. Here today, I would like to share with you the tactics that have been successful in the marketing of my own design tool.

First of all, I want to give you some information.

About 10 months ago, my partner and I decided to create a design tool for you to create 2D-3D logos, tattoos, illustrations, AI art. It has been about 9 months since our launch.

Growth so far, 1.55 M total impressions, 64.5 clicks! We continue to increase our income every month! Since the launch, I have been generating income through the subscription model thanks to my design tool.

During the 6 months after the launch, we grew using only SEO and organic marketing strategies. Over the past 2 months, we have tried both paid marketing and organic marketing. However, this caused both our sales and our Google indexes to decline. For this reason, we decided to stop paid marketing this month and focus on organic marketing again.

Our site traffic this month is 350K impressions, 12.1K clicks and 3.3K revenue. We have generated our traffic with viral organic content and SEO. We are trying to improve our product every day and get the best experience for you.

Yesterday, 16.4K impressions, 542 clicks!!

Although we are successful, we believe that the purchase rate is low!

How did we achieve this success? We had purchased a boilerplate to save time while creating our product. This boilerplate contained a marketing guide.

When I examined it carefully, startup directories and guest blog post sites were included in this guide to create high-quality backlinks. First of all, we started submitting our product to these sites!

With our launch, we started creating interesting social media posts. And we have made posts on social media pages that allow self-promotion.

We supported them with email marketing.

After about 3 months, our SEO had started to improve. In this process, we have tried to pay attention to the correct keyword usage and especially to the fact that the SEO blogs we have created are not AI.

And at the point we have reached today, we think we have done successful things in terms of SEO. What do you guys think?

The SE Ranking team researches AI Overviews across various niches, focusing on YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics requiring high reliability and accuracy. Since AIOs have a major influence on the information users encounter in Google searches, we analyzed their presentation in four key areas: health, politics, finance, and law. We found this information using our newly launched AI Overviews Tracker. Here’s what our team found:

• The legal niche triggers the highest percentage of AIOs (77.67%), followed by the health sector (65.33%), finance (41.67%), and politics (16.67%).
• The most common keyword patterns triggering AIOs for YMYL topics are how (how to, how often, how long, how much, how does), what is, what are, when, you, I.

AIOs are trying not to cause harm; could this be a reaction to the infamous ‘stone diet’ fiasco?

• 83% of health-related keywords triggering AIOs contained a disclaimer: “This is for informational purposes only. For medical advice or diagnosis, consult a professional. Generative AI is experimental.”
• 63.2% of finance-related keywords triggering AIOs included a disclaimer: “Generative AI is experimental. For financial (legal) advice, consult a professional.”
• 19.74% of keywords that triggered AI Overviews for legal topics featured a disclaimer stating: “Generative AI is experimental. For legal advice, consult a professional.”
• Google takes extra care with sensitive topics such as mental health, eating disorders, substance abuse, specific medications, Covid-19 and abortion, opting not to generate AIOs for these subjects.
• The most linked-to sites in AIOs for political topics are Wikipedia.org (36 links), State.gov (15 links), and DHS.gov (15 links).
• No AI Overviews were triggered for keywords containing terms like “election,” “elections,” “president,” or “presidential” while Search GPT by OpenAI does not have such a restriction.

This only covers a small fraction of our insights on this extensive topic. Find more information in our latest AI Overviews Research: Analyzing Google's approach to YMYL topics.

If I find that a certain site's backlink has really provided solid SEO results, I will be tempted to use that site again as obviously its relevant in the eyes of Google. How many links is too many? Can I do one link per month? Can I do 5?

Does anyone have experience with this?

The SE Ranking team is keeping a close eye on the latest trends in AI-driven search and sharing our insights with the SEO community. We’re also highlighting some of the most popular SEO topics on social media. Here are some hot topics people are talking about when it comes to AI Overviews.

---

Kevin Indig's latest research, published in Search Engine Journal, appeared in social media discussions two weeks in a row. In his analysis, Kevin tackles several key issues impacting the SEO community, presenting his findings through concise conclusions:

"[...] In other words, domains that get a lot of organic traffic have a high likelihood of being very visible in AI Overviews [...]

[...] Local queries have the highest amount of exact match overlap between query and answer; informational queries have the lowest [...]

[...] The majority, 60% of URLs cited in AIOs, still rank on the first page of organic results, reinforcing the point that a higher organic rank tends to lead to a higher chance of being cited in AIOs [...]"

Source:

Search Engine Journal | Kevin Indig

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Gagan Ghotra, who cited Australian news sources, began tracking the progress of AI Overviews rolling out in the region. He posted an article on LinkedIn titled "Google to Launch AI Overviews in Australia," sharing his insights on what Australian website holders should expect from the rollout.

Source:

LinkedIn | Gagan Ghotra

---

Charles Floate keeps an eye on Forbes Advisor dropping out of the SERPs while also looking into what’s in the AI snippets:

"Seeing a huge number of the Forbes Advisor pages dropping out of the SERPs right now...

However, SGE (AI Overviews) are still pulling them in just fine! I wonder if penalties will affect your ability to show up in these in the future."

This presents an intriguing opportunity to apply the same analysis to your own project pages while assessing the visibility of specific web resources within the AIO framework.

Source:

X | Charles_SEO

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Several news publications immediately began to push the news about Bing Generative Search on social networks. Each referred to an article by Kyle Wiggers called "Microsoft brings AI-powered overviews to Bing".

Social media users are calling Bing Generative Search a clear answer to Google's AI Overviews.

Sources:

X | Techmeme

X | mediagazer

…

---

That’s the buzz around AI Overviews right now. We’ll keep tracking the latest conversations and developments on this topic. Stay tuned for more!

Also, do you think that e-commerce businesses are increasingly investing in SEO nowadays?

I know that e-commerce businesses generally spend a lot on PPC, but recently I think Google is pushing e-commerce websites in organic search results as well, which is kind of counterintuitive.

I mean, it would be more profitable for them to push them down, so they would have to pay for paid ads. But I think I'm noticing an opposite trend. It's just an example. What do you think?

Lets say I am running a website not in the USA (typically .com)

Would having a country specific TLD be crucial my SEO efforts for that country or is it relatively minor?

For example
New Zealand: commonly .nz or .co.nz
United Kingdom: commonly .co.uk
Singapore: commonly .sg or .com.sg

Would running a normal .com website hurt my chances of success in that country? (given all other things are equal such as local ranking signals, etc)

Which SEO tools do you rely on most, and why? Have you found any lesser-known tools that provide great value?

Hey everyone,

A little backstory about my journey in the SEO world: I started my own SEO agency a little over 6 years ago and scaled it up pretty well (up to $2 million ARR with an acquisition). However, during the peak of COVID, tragedy struck. I lost two employees - one to COVID, and another shortly after - and one of them was not just an employee, but someone I had personally mentored for 6 years. The toll this took on me, combined with my own health struggles (COVID, followed by an accident with multiple injuries), was immense.

In the midst of all this, I decided to shut down the agency. Mentally and physically, I felt beaten. I moved into a full-time role with a former client of mine who had been with us since the beginning and saw me going through a rough patch, and it's been a good healing experience. I’ve learned a lot, sharpened my skills, and found stability again, while helping the client grow significantly over the past 3 years.

Now, after working for some time in this full-time position and leading SEO and marketing initiatives, I feel like I’ve healed enough to consider giving my agency another go. I’ve been able to stay updated and refine my strategies through my current work, and I feel like the time could be right to start fresh.

However, I'm nervous about jumping back in. Losing two key team members was something I never thought I’d face, and I want to make sure I handle things right this time, both from a business and personal perspective.

I would appreciate any advice or thoughts from those who’ve gone through similar transitions. Has anyone here revived their agency after stepping away? How did you handle team building after such personal loss? Would love to hear your experiences or advice! Or, if you’ve got any questions about SEO or backlinks, please feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance.

a

Hi there!

I recently got some funding (not too much, $1000 CAD or less) to improve the SEO of my jewelry business website, and was wondering if anyone suggests any good SEO tools (audit software, any keyword tools, etc?) that are worth it for me to pay for a year or so? Even a month or whatever. I'm very new to SEO so I don't know much about what to get.

Hey Experts,

I'm re-building my agency website and SEO is one of the main strategies I intend to use to drive traffic to it. I need your advice on the best CMS to build my website on.

I'm currently considering Hubspot mainly because it's connected to their CRM and I like to have everything in one place but I'm not sure if it's great for SEO.

Are tools like WordPress & Squarespace better? Does your CMS have any effect on SEO?

Thanks for your help!

Hey I want to expand and help some of the SEO projects for free at all, ao if you need any help from me whether it is in Technical SEO, On page or off page then please tell me.

Only 1 project right now.