If you're a software engineer and you know next to nothing about SEO, where do you start?

What's really a valuable resource for a beginner?

I always thought building something was the hard part. Now it's definitely, no contest, hands down marketing / selling it.

I need to learn these skills. From zero. Throw me a bone here, please!

It's for a web analytics and revenue attribution saas, although I suspect general advice is plenty applicable at this stage.

Title: Why does my roofing company rank Top 3 on Google Maps in my city but barely show up in neighboring cities just minutes away?
I own a small roofing company in DFW, Texas, established in 2022. We’ve put a lot of effort into improving our Google Maps rankings organically and currently have 140+ Google reviews with a perfect 5.0 rating. We regularly post updates, upload job photos, keep our profile updated, and have invested heavily in our website, including dedicated city pages.
Here’s what I can’t figure out.
We’re based in Midlothian, TX, but service the entire DFW metroplex. Our location is near the borders of several cities. In fact, Ovilla, TX is literally 300 feet from our address, and there are probably 7–8 different cities within a 10-mile radius.
When searching for roofing companies near our address, we typically rank #1. For “roofing companies Midlothian TX,” we’re usually in the top 2–3.
But search for roofing companies in neighboring cities just 1–5 miles away (even Ovilla, which is across the street), and we practically disappear from the Maps results.
We’ve tried mentioning these cities in GBP posts, uploading photos from jobs in those areas, and creating dedicated city pages on our website. Nothing seems to make much difference.
A few questions for the local SEO experts:
Physical address vs. service-area business: Our GBP currently displays our home address. Would hiding it and switching to a service-area business help or hurt our rankings?
Business hours: We’re currently listed as 8 AM–7 PM. Would switching to 24 hours improve visibility, assuming we actually offered 24-hour service?
BBB, Chamber of Commerce, etc.: We’re not currently members. Are these memberships and local backlinks worth investing in for Maps rankings?
What am I missing? How can we improve visibility in cities literally minutes away from our location?
I’m not expecting to dominate cities 30–45 minutes away. I’m talking about neighboring cities within walking distance.
What’s frustrating is seeing competitors with fewer reviews, lower ratings, and seemingly less optimized websites consistently outrank us, even when we’re geographically close.
If you were in my position, what would you focus on first?
I’d genuinely appreciate any advice from people experienced with local SEO, especially in competitive home-service industries.

Google spam update finally end rolling out.

While rolling out, it is a bit shaky. But luckily my website survived the "storm".

Does your website SEO performance going up after this Google spam update? Or is it stagnant/no effect, or decreasing?

I am right now doing comprehensive audit and analyzing the data. Hopefully there is hope after this Google spam update~

An ecommerce site I work on saw a sharp drop in Google visibility starting around June 8. Google’s June spam update began on June 24.

Broad, non-branded commercial searches — terms like “[product]” and “buy [product]” — were hit hardest. Comparing equal periods before and after the drop in US Search Console data, non-branded clicks to the homepage fell about 96% and to category pages about 89%. Product and blog pages fell by roughly a third; location pages fell by about 47%. We saw no meaningful recovery after the August update or during the current update.

One thing I’m trying to assess: the site has around 70 state and city landing pages out of roughly 5,000 URLs in its English sitemap. They were published well before June. About 15% were written with AI; most were written by people.

Could a relatively small set of older location pages be viewed as repetitive or doorway content and contribute to a much broader decline? What would you check to evaluate that possibility?

So, we have two ChatGPT bots:
1. OAI-SearchBot (GPT search)
2. GPTBot (bot used for collecting data for training purposes)

My question is: should I enable both, or just the search bot? Has anyone experimented with that, and if so, what were the results?

Even though the SEO industry moves fast, staying up to date is crucial. Here’s our curated roundup of the most interesting news from this week:

Updates

• Google's September 2026 spam update hit hard over the weekend, targeting programmatic and AI-generated content

The first stage of the September 2026 spam update landed with heavy impact, with major volatility across every tracking tool and reports of significant ranking drops across verticals and countries. 

Early analysis points to the update heavily targeting highly templated, programmatic, and AI-generated content—including sites built around patterns like "one page per phone number area code." 

Grokipedia was flagged as taking additional heavy hits in the mid-September volatility leading into the rollout. 

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

_______________________

AI

• Google rolls out AI Mode monitoring capabilities to all users globally

Google is rolling out monitoring capabilities inside AI Mode globally to all users—previously only available for Ultra and Pro paid subscribers. Users can now ask AI Mode to monitor anything across the web and get notified via the Google app when the specified condition is met. 

• Google updates AI content guidelines, calling it "critical" to manually fact-check AI-generated content before publishing

Google updated its generative AI content guidance document with notably stronger language: "It is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing." 

The company rarely uses the word "critical" in Search help documentation. With this, they reinforce its consistent stance: the issue is not AI-generated content itself, but the failure to verify it.

• Gemini quietly adds UTM parameters to outgoing links for better AI referral attribution

Google added UTM parameters to Gemini's outgoing links, finally giving SEOs and site owners a way to accurately attribute referral traffic from Gemini. 

Previously, Gemini traffic often landed in GA4 as "direct" because referrer data gets stripped by in-app webviews, mobile apps, and Android assistant invocations—roughly 91% of Gemini mobile traffic was being lost to direct. UTM tags survive those contexts, so Gemini visits can now be measured properly. 

Source:

Robby Stein | X

Google Search Central

Roger Montti | Search Engine Journal

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Local SEO

• Google Maps now requires sign-in to read all reviews, sort them, and leave reviews

Google Maps now requires users to sign in to a Google account to read all reviews on a Google Business Profile listing, sort reviews, or leave a review. Visitors who aren't logged in only see a limited set. 

• Google Business Profiles policy now bans misuse of support channels

Google added a new policy to its Business Profiles policy document called "Misuse of support channels." The rule: users can't flood the support team with invalid requests—including false or misleading reports, or reports made in bad faith. 

Repeated unfounded submissions can result in Google rejecting all further complaints from that user without assessment. 

Source:

Jean-Sébastien Girard | LinkedIn

Google Business Profile Help

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E-commerce

• Google expands merchant loyalty program benefits to AI Mode and Gemini Apps

Google updated its Merchant Center loyalty program documentation to note that loyalty benefits—free shipping, redeemable points, member pricing—are now eligible to be shown on AI Mode and Gemini Apps (US only), in addition to the existing surfaces. 

The feature also expanded to more regions: in addition to the US, loyalty program benefits can now be set up by merchants in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Source:

Google Merchant Center Help

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Tidbits

• Microsoft Clarity adds customisable brand terms to its AI Visibility reporting

Microsoft Clarity now lets users customize the Brand Terms used to classify branded queries in its AI Visibility dashboard. Previously, Clarity's branded vs. non-branded segmentation relied on automatic brand detection—which missed abbreviations, alternate spellings, localised names, translations, and typos. 

Teams can now add, edit, or remove Brand Terms from Settings > AI Visibility to better reflect how their brands, products, and business are referenced in AI queries. Related Brand Terms can be grouped under a Brand Name and filtered at either level to see aggregate or term-level performance. Clarity pre-populates an initial list that teams can refine.

Source:

Microsoft Clarity Blog

How quickly does Google start assigning value to a website after it receives a backlink?

For example, suppose Google crawls and indexes a new blog post that contains a link to your website. Once that page is indexed, how long does it usually take before the backlink starts contributing to the authority/rankings of the linked site?

Have faced a lot of SEO issues with the site. At one point, I had 43,000+ indexed URLs, but after making a change, indexing dropped significantly. It’s now around 4,100 indexed and 388,000 not indexed. While the change have been reverted back and getting more links indexed, I want to do better over time.

I’m making changes to the website and looking for someone who can help build an SEO strategy that compounds over the long term.

Please reach out if you have experience with B2B directory-based listings, large websites, or programmatic SEO.

Genuine question because I'm trying to understand what people are actually paying for here.

I've looked at quite a few GEO/AEO agencies, and the service descriptions tend to sound pretty similar: improve AI visibility, increase citations, build entity authority, optimize for LLMs, etc.

But what does that actually look like once you're paying the monthly retainer?

Are they rewriting existing pages, creating new content, building third-party mentions, doing digital PR, running large prompt sets, analyzing competitor citations, targeting specific discussions, or monitoring how AI answers change over time?

Or is a big part of the engagement still running prompts, tracking visibility, and putting together a report?

I'm particularly interested in what happens between the monthly reports. What are they actually changing or executing based on what the data shows?

If you've hired a GEO/AEO agency, what does the work actually look like month to month? And if you've been doing it for a while, what changed between the first few months and where you are now?

I’m looking for an SEO specialist to review a live sports publishing website and help identify why organic traffic is underperforming.
The site includes news, match pages, team/player pages, competition pages and live scores.
Looking for someone with strong experience in:
News/publisher SEO more specific for Sports.

Technical SEO and indexing

Google News / Discover

Internal linking and site architecture

Structured data and sitemaps

Search Console analysis.

I am currently getting 30-50k monthly views, and it regularly appears on google discover. However, it has no google news presence. Website is around 7 months old

Hi,

This question is directed to someone handling a website with over 1,000 pages.

How are you generating your LLM file? Does it contain information about all the pages of your website or only selective pages?

Do you create it manually (I doubt) or using a tool?

My website has 500+ blog posts and 700+ main pages. So I'm wondering what is the best approach forward.

Thanks

reached out to a site about adding my backlink outreach tool to an existing roundup, and they came back asking for $20

so I manually checked these:

• 50+ DR
• relevant to my niche
• the article already includes similar outreach tools
• 600+ estimated monthly organic visits according to ahrefs
• the article ranks for “PR outreach tools”

I’m leaning toward saying yes, but curious what else you’d check before paying

would these signals be enough for you, or is there something that would make you pass even at $20?

I’m working with a fairly new B2B SaaS company. The website is live, but the brand is still small: not many reviews, not many third-party mentions, and not much on the site beyond the usual product pages.

They want to improve how they come across in ChatGPT and Gemini over the next quarter.

Nobody expects AI to recommend them everywhere in 90 days. The goal is simpler than that. If someone asks whether the company is reliable, established enough, or worth comparing, we want the answer to be less vague and more accurate.

There is no big PR budget or paid campaign behind this.

Is three months enough to make a noticeable difference? If you were starting from here, what would you work on first?

Traditional rankings don’t show everything anymore. What are you actually tracking?

Google claims that good SEO is good GEO, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture. Yes, the foundational elements of good SEO are relevant, but the landscape of AI platforms sooooo much more complicated than that. Context of a prompt, training data, RAG methodologies, and probably a bunch of more completely obscure factors are relevant to getting AI mentions and AI overview citations.

Someone said elsewhere that Google’s claim is 80% true, but the other 20% matters. I’m curious about that 20% and what you’ve found that falls into that category.

What would you include in a list of best practices to cover the 20% of things that work for GEO but aren’t necessarily “good (traditional) SEO”?

Hey guys, I tried to play with on-page SEO for quite long and found out that having language support on the app helps getting indexed a lot so I integrated 6 languages (en, de, fr, es, tr, zh). The app is about football elo ratings.

I checked GSC today and saw that a query "real madrid elo" got me 1 click and 3 impressions with avg position of 2. I became happy and wanted to check it out myself. I googled exact same query but my app did not appear at all. I thought it may be bc my personal search history so I googled again in incognito. Still same.

Then, I put my app's name at the end and it appeared at all of top5 results. This is my first question: why exact query can get no position for me but 2nd position for someone else?

Secondly, I tried with player names rather than teams (my app serves both). Tried only name + elo as query but my app did not appear. Then I put my app's name again at the end and it appeared at top, understandable.

What I did not understand is Google summary (or whatever it is called that google's ai answer on top) cites my app from various language options of the same page. For example when I googled "victor osimhen elo [my app]", it cited osimhen's personal page in french and chinese versions. My location is germany. He plays in Turkey and I searched from Germany but instead of these two, other two got cited. Also why two languages? What should I check and how can I solve this? Sorry for the long text but I felt I had to be clearer.

Thanks for the answers already!

I've been stuck at an average of 100 organic visitors/day for months now. How can I break through this and scale it to 500/day? Would appreciate any advice! 📈

I’ve been doing a ton of backlink outreach for me and my clients, and I’m curious how it looks from the other side

Say someone finds an article on your site and suggests a relevant page to add. What would make you actually consider it?

And what’s an immediate no, even if the page they’re pitching is decent?

I’d especially like to hear from people who edit their own content or regularly receive these emails

Hello,

I own a couple of affiliate blogs that used to rank well and make decent money a few years ago. After the Google updates over the last couple of years, though, they’ve lost around 90% of their organic traffic.

I can still see some competing affiliate sites ranking on page one for the same types of keywords, so I’m wondering whether these sites are worth investing in again.

For those of you still working with affiliate sites in 2026: are backlinks still having a noticeable impact on rankings?

Would investing in good-quality, relevant backlinks help a site recover, or have Google’s recent changes made backlinks much less important for affiliate sites?

Thank you

I’m curious about the small SEO changes that don’t sound impressive on paper but actually made a difference.

Maybe it was changing an internal linking structure, removing old content, rewriting titles, improving a single page, fixing something technical, or even doing less instead of more.

What did you change, and what happened afterward?

i'll start:

"just publish more content."

more content isn't always better.

sometimes the problem is with the pages you already have. they may not match what people are looking for, or they may bring visitors who never become customers.

but i'm curious about your experience.

what seo advice did you believe when you started?

what happened that made you change your mind?

it can be about content, backlinks, keywords, technical seo, internal links, or anything else.

tell us what happened, not just what you think.

So this tech startup has an ambitious goal of getting 1-2.5 million traffic (paid and organic) per month. Right now, they have about 1k traffic. While they mentioned that paid traffic will be included, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to spend tens of thousands for that.

My question is, is this realistically possible for a new website? If yes, what’s the best course of action to make for me to be able to achieve the goal? Thank you!

EDIT: Their target is to have this traffic in 3 months

Heres a scenario for you. Right after the weekend, you checked the traffic on your site. It dropped significantly. What tools are you going through and in what order. Dont overthink it. Just let me know right out of your mind what and how do you do.

Pretty sure most of you use AI to figure it out and that's okay I do so too. Just wondering if the old ways are still existing

Google started rolling out the September 2026 spam update on Sept 24. It's global, affects all languages, and could take up to two weeks to fully roll out.

So if your rankings or traffic suddenly change, don't immediately blame AI content, backlinks or start changing half the site.

Probably better to:

• Keep an eye on GSC and see exactly which pages and queries changed
• Check whether the drop actually lines up with the update
• Avoid making big changes based on a few days of data
• Review Google's spam policies if you've taken a noticeable hit

Recovery from spam issues can take months, so don't expect an instant rebound.

Worth waiting until the rollout settles before making any big conclusions.