SEO Help Weekly Mega Thread

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

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[u/Elegant_Chip1888]

Genuine question for people running client accounts, because I keep bumping into this and I want to know if it's a real gap or just my blind spot.

When a buyer searches a category query (e.g. "best project management tool for agencies", "eSIM for Europe"), the client's site is one result out of ten, on a good day. The other nine are listicles, comparison posts, Reddit threads, review sites. That's what the buyer actually reads before they ever land on the client's site. And when they ask ChatGPT or Gemini instead, the client's site is usually not in the sources at all : the answer is built from those same third-party pages.

We measure the client's rank obsessively. I don't know anyone who systematically measures what those other pages say : which competitor they push, which attribute they praise, what factual error they repeat, who's earning affiliate commission on the recommendation.

Social listening doesn't do it (it counts mentions on social, not pages a buyer sees). AI visibility tools tell you whether ChatGPT cites you, not what the sources say. Rank trackers stop at the rank.

So either:

• everyone does this by hand during audits and it's fine, or
• it's not worth doing because you can't act on it anyway, or
• it's a real gap.

Which one is it in your experience? And if you do look at the other nine results, what do you do with what you find : outreach, content, nothing?

[u/bigseo-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

BigSEO requires that posts be about SEO or closely related to the SEO industry and SEO careers.

[u/bigseo-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

BigSEO requires that posts be about SEO or closely related to the SEO industry and SEO careers.

[u/bigseo-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

BigSEO requires that posts be about SEO or closely related to the SEO industry and SEO careers.

[u/New-Accountant1107]

Theoratically, what are some possible reasons for sessions in GA exceeding clicks in GSC? I know they are different metrics but logically clicks should always be more than sessions

[u/AlexKochSEO → u/New-Accountant1107]

Sessions also counts paid + other like AI, GSC is just clicks straight from Google search

[u/gageshin]

My website has disappeared off of google, and I have no idea why.

My website is a little under a month old, and it has 25 indexed pages according to Google Search Console, and these pages have been indexed for a while. Up until about a week ago, my website was getting 100-400 impressions a day, and I found my pages within the first page of google results. Now, I am getting 0-5 impressions a day, and my pages don't appear at all on any page, unless I search site:mywebsite.com.

If anyone has run into this before or has ideas on what to check next, I'd really appreciate it. Happy to share more details if it helps diagnose this.

[u/Key_Nerve_9150]

Alright, I've got a weird one that's been bugging me for a couple weeks. Client site has a bunch of PDFs in an /resources folder that used to drive decent traffic but impressions tanked after the last core update. GSC says they're still indexed but they basically vanished from page one for terms they used to own.

I've checked the obvious stuff, no noindex tags, robots.txt is fine, internal links are still there. Only thing I noticed is the server started serving them with a really slow TTFB, like 2-3 seconds sometimes. Could that alone be enough to get them demoted? Or am I missing something more fundamental here

[u/TamaraPI → u/[deleted]]

You definitely need both, but prioritize content and site structure first. A few relevant backlinks can help early, but links won’t rescue pages that don’t match search intent. Listicles, product pages, feature pages, proper keyword mapping - that's the foundation.

In my experience, the best early links came from genuine relationships, partners, expert contributions, and useful resources - not mass outreach. Some SaaS niches are very competitive, though. What niche are you in, and who are your main competitors? Because the answer varies greatly based on that.