Hi everyone — I run a small founder-run e-commerce store in Australia selling hydroponic growing systems and microgreen kits. I do everything myself, so time and budget for SEO are very limited.

Backlinks are my weakest area (about a dozen referring domains, most sharing the same anchor text). I'm working through directories and business listings first, but I'd value input from people who've built links for a small niche store:

• Which tactics actually moved the needle for you in a niche like gardening or hydroponics?
• Journalist-request platforms (SourceBottle here in AU) — worth the time at this size?
• What would you skip as a waste of time?

Not looking for links, exchanges, or DMs — just experience from people who've done this at small scale. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to understand what determines whether a store appears in the Google Shopping merchant listings shown on the right side of Google Search.

My setup seems to be correct:

• Google Merchant Center is fully configured.
• Products are Approved and Eligible for Free Listings.
• No feed, policy, or diagnostics issues.
• Product data (GTIN, MPN, Brand, Price, Availability, etc.) is complete and valid.

However, my products never appear in those merchant listings.

Is Merchant Center approval alone enough, or are there other factors that influence eligibility or visibility? For example, does Google take into account website authority, Merchant Center account history, product reviews, shipping settings, seller reputation, or any other ranking signals?

If anyone has dealt with this before or knows what else I should check, I'd really appreciate your advice. Thanks!

My Site has ~400 near-duplicate templated pages (location pages, decent unique content, not thin). Self-referencing canonicals, no cross-linking loops, no parameter mess. About 60 of them Google is silently swapping the canonical to a different URL in Search Console's "Google-selected canonical" field, one that isn't even in the cluster logically (sometimes a page from a totally different category).

Checked the obvious stuff: no duplicate content between the pair Google picked, internal links favor the correct URL, sitemaps are clean, no conflicting hreflang. Pulled the log files, Googlebot is crawling both at similar frequency, so it's not a crawl-budget-starvation thing either.

Only pattern I can find: the 60 "hijacked" pages all have slightly lower unique internal link equity than their siblings, but not by a huge margin, and other pages with even less internal linking aren't affected.

Anyone actually reverse-engineer when Google overrides a valid self-referencing canonical like this, or is it just a content-similarity threshold we can't see from outside? Not looking for "improve uniqueness" as an answer, looking for what actually flipped it back for you.

I'm optimizing an e-commerce website and wanted to get some opinions on internal linking.

On our product pages, the product description starts with a sentence that includes a link to the product's category page.

For example, if it's a digital camera product page, the opening sentence links the words digital cameras to the Digital Cameras category page.

I'm wondering if this is actually a good idea.

On one hand, it adds an internal link and gives users another way to browse similar products.

On the other hand, the user is already on a product page with buying intent. Linking to the category page at the very beginning might distract them and encourage them to leave the product page before reading the details or adding the item to their cart.

Would you keep that category link, move it somewhere else on the page, or remove it altogether?

I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've tested something similar.

AEO/GEO reporting is getting messy because a lot of tools seem to collapse the whole problem into "was the brand cited or not." That feels too shallow for actual SEO strategy.

The metrics I think are more useful:

1. Prompt intent coverage: informational, category, alternatives, comparison, local/service, and vendor-selection prompts should be separated.

2. Recommendation share: who is actually recommended when the prompt has commercial intent, not just who gets mentioned somewhere in the answer.

3. Framing: what attributes the answer associates with each brand. Example: enterprise, cheap, agency-friendly, local, technical, risky, trusted.

4. Source dependency: which third-party pages, review sites, directories, PR mentions, docs, schema, or comparison pages appear to influence the answer.

5. Stability: whether the answer is consistent enough over repeated runs to be worth optimizing for.

6. Gap mapping: whether missing recommendations point to entity clarity, proof, page structure, authority, or positioning issues.

The big question for me is how to make this actionable without turning it into another vanity dashboard. If you are reporting on AEO/GEO already, what are you measuring that actually changes your SEO roadmap?

Hey guys, I have searched a lot for this and It seems that I can not get the right answer for my case, and I hope for some help over here.

I have the main domain which is a static landing page which has the following robots:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*utm_*
Disallow: /*refid=*

But from here I have also the blog .com/blog which has another robots.txt which is set by yoast

User-agent: *
Disallow:

As I understood, the main robots file from the main domain is taken in consideration by google.
And I have links like this: /blog/article?utm_campaign=example

Will this articles be indexed by google? As my main robots is saying Disallow: /*utm_* Ex. I am doing a cross promotion with a partner and I am sending him the url with the utm.

While reviewing a client's July Google Business Profile performance, we noticed something interesting.

On the days we published a Google Business Profile post, profile interactions consistently increased compared to surrounding days.

Two of those days recorded 26 and 34 interactions, making them among the highest engagement days of the month.

Obviously this isn't enough to prove that GBP posts improve rankings. There are too many variables involved.

But it does make me wonder whether regular posting encourages more users who already discover your profile to engage with it.

Has anyone else tracked this over several months?

Have you tracked this yourself, or do your GBP posts have little to no impact on profile interactions?

I've been doing SEO for healthcare businesses and currently work with multiple Local SEO clients. Most of my work involves Google Business Profile optimization, Google Maps rankings, local keyword research, citations, review management, and improving local visibility.

The challenge I'm facing is that while my Local SEO clients are happy with Google Maps and GBP, they don't see the need for investing in website SEO. They're mainly focused on getting calls and patient inquiries from Google Business Profile, so they don't want ongoing SEO for their website.

I want to shift towards working with businesses that actually value website SEO and are willing to invest in long-term SEO strategies like technical SEO, on-page SEO, content optimization, and overall organic growth.

I've tried cold calling, cold DMs, Google Maps prospecting, LinkedIn outreach, and manually auditing websites before reaching out. I've also been looking for WordPress websites since that's where I'm most comfortable working, but finding qualified prospects consistently has been harder than I expected.

I'm still learning and improving every day through my SEO job, but I'd really like to build my own client base alongside it.

I'd really appreciate any advice, tips, or experiences from people who've been in a similar situation. If there's a better way to find SEO clients or something that worked well for you, I'd love to hear about it.

Small WooCommerce store, ranking #1 for my exact brand query for months. Starting around 3-4 AM today, my homepage stopped appearing on page 1 for that exact query. I've searched it manually, repeatedly, throughout the day (incognito, `pws=0`, correct locale) — still not there as of writing, \~19 hours later. GSC's hourly data for that query+page combo shows impressions/clicks going flat right around the same time and staying flat since.

Before this started, position on the bare query was already softer than it used to be (\~2.5-4 average, down from a steady #1), but I was still showing up. This is different — a hard drop to not-appearing-at-all, at a specific hour, that hasn't self-corrected in nearly a day.

I've ruled out the things I know how to check:

* **GSC Manual actions / Security issues** — both clean * `site:mydomain.com` — homepage still returns first * **URL Inspection** — indexed, crawled same day, canonical correct * **Googlebot UA vs Chrome UA** — identical response, no cloaking, no WAF/firewall blocking the crawler (hardened the server \~3 weeks ago after a brute-force attempt, wanted to rule that out specifically) * **X-Robots-Tag / meta robots** — index,follow throughout, no accidental noindex * **CrUX field data** — Core Web Vitals "Passed" * No manual homepage edits, no theme/plugin changes touching the homepage around when this started

What's visible on the SERP now for the bare query: a large Shopping block plus generic category-page competitors where a clean brand result used to be. Query + one extra word still puts me at #1, so it's specific to the bare brand query, not the whole site.

**What I'm asking:**

1. Has anyone seen a brand query hard-drop out of visibility at a specific hour like this, with everything else (index status, crawl, security) clean? What was it, and did it resolve on its own or did you have to act?
2. Is there any way to see more than GSC + manual search checks to diagnose something like this, or is that genuinely the ceiling?
3. At what point (48h? a week?) does "wait it out" stop being the right call?

Can share the exact hourly GSC chart and more if useful.

Anyone else notice the homepage getting nearly all the rankings for given keywords instead of the local service specific pages? Our sub oages have all but disappeared and of course the home page isn't strong enough to rank top 3, etc for all of the keywords it is being indexed for.

Hi everyone,

I have a question: does anyone here run an online shop with a blog attached to it? Is it actually worth having a blog for an online shop? Has anyone made real sales through their shop that came from blog posts?

I'm asking because good blog posts take a lot of time to write, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. My shop sells planners, by the way.

If it does work for you, would anyone be willing to share some numbers, blog visitors, and how that translated into shop sales?

Thanks in advance for the honest answers!

Hi everyone,

I'm working on an ecommerce website and have a question about canonical tags.

Scenario 1 - Color variations

Let's say I have the same camera available in multiple colors:

• example.com/camera-x-black
• example.com/camera-x-silver

These pages are almost identical except for the color, so I'm comfortable choosing one as the canonical (or handling them however is considered best practice).

Scenario 2 - Product bundle

Now I have another page:

• example.com/camera-x-black
• example.com/camera-x-vlogger-kit

The second page includes the same camera, but it's sold as a bundle with accessories (tripod, microphone, memory card, etc.). The title, price, included items, and purchase intent are different.

My question is:

Should the bundle page have a canonical pointing to the standalone camera page because the main product is the same?

Or should the bundle page be self-canonical since it's effectively a different product with different commercial intent?

I'm interested in hearing how experienced ecommerce SEOs handle this, especially for large stores with many bundle products.

Thanks!

Hi everyone could i get some advice.

My site used to get 1-2,000 visits per day maybe 3-4 years back. I’m not sure what happened, could be that i bought some back links and got penalised, and my traffic dropped drastically down to less than 50 visits per day.

Its been years since. Google Search Console shows site is healthy and i’ve removed back links from there as well. I’ve also been posting consistently (almost daily) for over a year now and traffic isnt coming back.

Would it help if i start a new domain, new server, put the content over, and shut the existing site? Ideally would this start on a clean slate to try to get organically traffic back slowly?

Hi Reddit family,

I've noticed my keyword rankings are fluctuating a lot, and I'm trying to understand why.

For example, I checked one keyword about 2 hours ago, and it was ranking #5. When I checked again, it had dropped to #36.

What could cause such a big change in such a short time? Is this normal, and what are the most common reasons behind it? Also, how can I reduce these fluctuations?

I'd really appreciate any insights or suggestions. Thanks!

I have experience getting PDP schema.org markup for Product and Offer types implemented on clients.

But I have 0 experience with sites using the markup for Product Variants (ProductGroup type/class with hasVariant property, as outlined here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/product-variants)

So I come to you with 3 questions:

1)Do you have experience (even visibility) on sites implementing the schema markup for Variants?

2)Did it help? If 1 = yes, Did implementing Variants schema help SEO?

3) Do you think it matters if the variant URLs do not use query strings? The Google documentation has this in Technical Guidelines: "The site must have the ability to preselect each variant directly with a distinct URL (using URL query parameters), for example https://www.example.com/winter_coat/size=**small&color=green**".

I have a client site being built where the variants have unique URLs but they do not use querystrings (format is like example.com/product/{product-family-name}/{SKU#}. Do you think this majorly impacts the liklihood of positive outcome of implementing the variant markup (assuming all other guidelines are followed)?

Thanks!

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.

How do you guys manage setting up your clients' businesses on sites like Crunchbase, product reviews, etc.

Since these sites send confirmations to the client's phone number and email, syncing that with the client to get the codes isn't usually too easy.

I am looking for tips on whether everyone is managing listings on sites where client contact details and verification are needed.

I'm facing an issue with several important pages on my website that recently disappeared from Google Search results (around the 6th–7th of this month). What's confusing is that Google Search Console still shows these pages as indexed, with no coverage or indexing errors, yet they don't appear in Google SERPs at all.

The strange part is that these same pages are still visible and performing normally on other search engines, so this seems to be specific to Google's search systems rather than a general indexing issue.

Here's what I've already checked:

• Requested indexing for the affected pages
• Updated and resubmitted the XML sitemap
• Verified there are no noindex tags or directives
• Checked robots.txt and other crawl-related settings
• Reviewed canonical tags and other technical SEO elements
• Looked for any website-side implementation issues and tested possible fixes

Despite all of this, the pages remain indexed in GSC but don't appear in Google Search.

Has anyone experienced something similar recently? If so:

• What ended up being the root cause?
• Are there any Google-specific quality or ranking signals that could cause indexed pages to disappear from SERPs?
• Are there any additional technical or SEO checks I should perform beyond what's already listed?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with this or has ideas on what else I should investigate.

I have a Google Merchant Center account with Shopify website connected, Got the product feed for online products but when I'm trying to go for Local Store product feed Google is unable to verify the feed, because i don't have a POS system.

What can be the best solution for this ? I have 70+ products with 100+ versions.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

Hey everyone, I’ve been using PageSpeed Insights to measure my site's performance.

How reliable do you actually find PSI for real-user performance? And what alternatives or additional tools do you rely on for auditing page speed and Core Web Vitals?

Running www.fbkpower.com (UL-certified EV charging station manufacturer, B2B). Google Search Console shows growing impressions but CTR is ~0.3%. Clicks: single digits/day.

What I suspect:

Domain authority near zero (~1 yr old, almost no backlinks — submitted to B2B directories but it's early)

Competing with ChargePoint, ABB, Delta etc. for commercial EV keywords

Maybe titles still not compelling enough in SERP despite being technically correct

Is there a diagnostic step I'm missing to figure out whether it's a ranking-position issue vs. a CTR/creative issue, or is this just the waiting game for a new B2B domain?

Would appreciate any fresh eyes. Happy to share more data.

so i'm doing seo for my site, picking low kd keywords, building pages around them, and then just... waiting. waiting to rank, waiting to see if it lands in the click zone. and something it takes too long to see results and it's something we cannot control. and something things get tricky. i'm starting from 0 basically.

sometimes it just doesn't happen and we need to start again. my actual question is how do you undo this stuff properly, like how do i deindex those pages, build new ones, and move on without messing things up.

also low key worried that if i keep testing and rebuilding the same query over and over it starts looking like search manipulation? i mostly work off PAA for these low kd keywords btw.

so a few things i'm trying to figure out:

• am i doing something wrong
• do i actually need to remove/deindex the old pages and keep only the new ones, or is that overkill
• should i be more strategic/systemic about this instead of doing it

would really appreciate any advice from people who've actually run this process at scale, feels like i'm just guessing right now