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Hi all,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to read my post. I am the owner of the brand and not a SEO specialist, I need help of you guys.

Drop in traffic
As you might know Google has rolled out the last HCU (Helpful content update) and our Ecommerce site has been dropped significantly in traffic. We went from averaging 1000 clicks to somewhere between 500-600 in one day. Still decreasing. Our site continuedly collected 1000 clicks per day for more than 1 year now.

This drop we saw happening from the 25^(th) of April.

Some background information about our site:
Market: sneakers
Domain Rating (Ahref): 12
Backlink strategy: we do not actively build links
Content strategy: basic product content (we did not change anything regarding this)

Did we change anything shortly before the drop has happened?

• No content changes
• No technical changes
• No backlinks added / removed
• Overall online reputation is the same

As we did a deepdive into the data, we saw that generally speaking our positions weren’t hit, but the strange part is that our impressions has been hit very hard.

My question:
How is it possible that the impressions has been hit so hard, yet our positions aren’t hit that hard. Also if the problem was position, we should have see a decrease in clicks and not in impressions right? In the market we did not see any change regarding content.

I also have some hypothese that on or more competitors are investing in backlinks, but it is strange that drop has been happened in one day. If the hypothese is correct, it should decrease over time right?

Hope to hear from you guys!

Thanks in advance.

Hey! I'm Lidia Infante, nice to meet you!

I've been in SEO and marketing for about 10 years. I started my career in social media, events and PPC and moved to SEO as the Digital Editor in Chief of a portfolio of wellness magazines. Since then, I've been mostly in house, working for international SaaS B2B companies like BigCommerce, Sanity and SurveyMonkey.

My main areas of expertise are content strategy, technical SEO, headless SEO and international SEO. I am a huge fan of communicating complex SEO concepts in ways that are understandable for beginners and enriching for advanced SEOs.

I'm passionate about championing women in the industry (this will go down well on Reddit) and combatting the misinformation and obscurity that has typically surrounded SEO and that lets scammers thrive.

To keep the conversation going, you can find me on Twitter or Linkedin!

PS: Trolls are boring, don't be one.

Asking here since the ahrefs subreddit seems dead. Would love to use the historical + forecast data to build some dashboards, but right now can only export this data one keyword at a time through the web UI.

How do you do it? I just keep staring at the google sheet — it’s too much data.

I need to remove a ton of low performing content, get everything down to a more manageable level.

HCU smashed the site, so need to rebuild and refocus.

But I literally have no idea where to start. I have all the low performing content isolated (there’s a mountain of the stuff).

Any auditors out there got any tips for chunking things out so it doesn’t feel so utterly soul destroying?

We have a fairly unique scenario where an established brand is launching a new product that will exist in a new (but tangential) market apart from their established main product. We are hesitant to just add the new product to the existing site because it is a different type of product targeted at a different demographic (think like a tire company that will branch into selling car cd players).

The original product and all of the supporting site content is so well established and geared towards that specific product that we do not want to start adding content surrounding the new product to the existing site and risk sending mixed signals to search engines. Because of this we are considering a subdomain or possibly even an entirely new domain. It is my understanding that a subdomain would begin to rank and build authority much quicker because it could be supported with internal linking from the main domain. The new product will also be under the same existing brand and has the potential of becoming the brand's flagship product down the road.

We have the option to buy the .com domain for the exact name of the new product so there is some consideration of just going that route with an entirely new domain but we realize that would be close to starting from zero. It might also be strange to start having a bunch of branded keywords across two entirely separate domains.

What is the best way to approach this from a branding and SEO perspective? Subdomain or new domain?

​

Any and all input is greatly appreciated!

What's the best way to update your content? I have some articles that were ranking quite well last year, but have lost quite a bit since the new year. I posted those articles between 2022 and mid 2023, so I think part of it could be that Google prefers newer content. I want to update the content a bit, but also the date - Do I just change the date of 'Posted on' to a new date, or should I use a plug-in to show when it was last edited? Or any other suggestions? Thanks!

Over 15 years of experience and practical application,
covering various aspects of Digital Marketing - but this one is meant to focus on SEO.

On-site, On-page, Off-site
Technical, Content, Links
Crawling, Rendering, Indexing, Ranking
Micro-sites through to Mega-sites

Lets see what questions you have!

.

Trolls.
As chances are some of you won't be able to resist - try to keep it clean,
and remember - real people, real questions, take the priority!

For example, let's say you have a boat rental website - you're obviously trying to rank for the boat rental keyword and you decide to create a pricing page. Why not make the url www.boatrentalblahblah. com/boat-rental-pricing. Or if it's the FAQ page www.boatrentalblahblah. com/boat-rental-faq. I notice that so many people just use a standard /faq or /pricing.

​

I want to preserve the link equity here. What is my best coarse of action here? 302 redirect seems straight forward. What are its disadvantages and what are our alternatives.

Example would be I have a domain/black-friday page

When the sale is over I want to 302 to say home or general sales page and when Black Friday is coming back I want to remove the 302 and use the URL to run the next sale

What would be a bulk Backlink checker with API, the one you find most reasonably priced? (say < $100 for example)

So far I have been using Majestic mostly but the API plan at EUR 379 per month is still pricey if you ask me. (of course, any such plans might not be depending on the user's needs). I also tried LinkAssistant API but found it not to be that affordable (consumes a lot of "units" per request by design).

If you find yourself in between a casual user and a marketing agency usage or so that can afford 3-4 figs monthly, what do you use?

TIA

Over the past year, I've been writing LOTS of meta descriptions and titles for different websites.

BUT: Why isn't there a tool to make this process faster? Imagine being able to paste a bunch of website links and instantly getting well-written meta descriptions. Or uploading a sitemap and getting customized meta tags for each page.

Am I the only one who thinks this would be handy?

If you know of any tools that can do this, please share. Because while there are lots of meta generators out there, they all seem to focus on one page at a time...

Anyone have any experience with these CMS?s

A client wants to migrate to a headless solution... wondering if anyone here has experience with any of these CMSs?

Thanks for all comments

Hi all,

I've been noticing random drops in GSC throughout the last year. Some posts seem to completely dissapear (while still indexed), and some with intervals. To show up for a few weeks/months again (and ranking well) to then stay or dissapear (again).

I've added a few screenshots. Has anyone experienced something similar and if so what did you try and has it worked?

Many thanks

example 1

example 2

example 3

example 4

example 5

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.

My website has been impacted by the recent March core update, and I'm looking for guidance on how to get back on track.

I'd be very appreciative if someone could review my website and suggest improvements to recover traffic and boost SEO.

Here's some context:

- The Website name is - "CnbDaily" you can look it on Google.

- My niche is troubleshooting guides for mobile apps, software, and games.

- I primarily publish content in the form of troubleshooting guides.

What I'm hoping to achieve:

- Actionable advice on enhancing content quality and user experience for my troubleshooting guides.

- Recommendations for technical SEO fixes, if relevant.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

As i am working on SEO and Google Ads both at the same time, I'm curious which tool might be better off for both activities, previously I have been using ahrefs paid plan and it was smooth so far but as I'm entering in to google ads also, I have heard that keyword research and project management + reporting is far better on SEMrush as compared to ahref... whats your take on this?

The traffic on my website has now lost its traffic by 50% and my boss says it is due to that we are not getting more links.

I told him that backlinks are important but shouldn't be the reason why our traffic dropped. What should be done though to gain my traffic back, will it be back in the next core update (given that we keep on working helpful content)
Plus, we were already making good content, it wasn't copied, all the content was from 1st hand experience.

Thanks in advance

This is a WordPress website.

Like the title suggests, I am a HK resident and for a bunch of reasons I need to be in the UK for longer periods of time.

Would a (marketing) UK employer be ok with me being in a GMT+8 timezone for like 7 months (on and off) during a year?

Asking here cause maybe some brits here know the UK employer mindset (ref to WFH) much more than me.

(I'm a UK national just haven't lived or worked there since, well, 2010)

Thanks for all replies

Hey guys,

Pretty new to all this.

I'm using Ahrefs to look into some KWs. In most KWs I'm looking into the volume/global volume and traffic potential (from ranking 1st) seem to kinda align, but in some rare cases I get something like:

VOLUME (US): 20, Global volume: 30, Traffic potential 1400

As I said, I'm pretty new to this, but this maths doesn't seem to be mathing.

My first idea was off the bat to look into this using other tools, but I wanted to ask if this is something common, an error of Ahrefs, or if not then what is happening.

Thanks in advance

Do you consider traffic from aol.com, yahoo.com, etc, Referral or Organic search? GA4 buckets these as 'referral'

Casual Friday is back!

Chat about anything you like, SEO or non-SEO related.

Feel free to share what you have been working on this week, side projects, career stuff... or just whatever is on your mind.

In the past we used SEMrush reports but found them quite rigid (but they have not overhauled it), but then moved to Looker Studio for more flexibility (albeit, much more time consuming).

However I am researching reporting platforms to make work more efficient (Swydo was one I considered but didn't seem that customisable) - what do people in the SEO community use/recommend? It would be ideal if it also reports on Google Ads/PPC and other channels so that there is consistency between reports. Thanks!

I've notice a big correlation between a 3rd party consent banner and the new INP metric. I'm using Cookiebot. Anyone experiencing the same thing with other cmp?

Hi guys, I recently started working for a company who’s having over 2M traffic per month.

Now I’ve only worked with small companies - and as an executive - but they want me to focus on the analysis part of it here.

There are over 9000 pages on the website - some doing well, some not.

How do I analyse all of this data by myself?

I am really confused on how to proceed with this. I have all this data but I’m not able to come up with a proper conclusion on what to do.

What’s the sorting I should be doing?

I have checked a few videos online and so far a good advice I’ve gotten is to categorise them based on the different services and content. But once I’ve done that what are some things I need to look at daily, weekly and monthly? At a smaller scale it was easier to figure out what route to take, but with all of this it gets quite tough.

If anyone could give me tips on how to work with large scale clients and data it’d be great help.

Thanks!

I'm a bit nervous as I've never done this before in my 12 years as an SEO, but there are too many issues with our current agency and CMS, which is tied to the agency, and our website is only getting bigger and we need to make it faster and improve UX.

Anyone had to do this before and do you have any tips or horror stories?

Some very interesting insights coming out as to why the SERPs are providing low-quality search results at the moment on Google, which is coming from internal issues/politics at Google:

In February 2019, Google's ads and finance teams called a "code yellow" on search, because revenue was slow and - seriously - people were not asking Google enough questions. Ben Gomes, then head of search, refused to make Google Search worse for profit— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Gomes managed to help get Google through the code yellow - but Raghavan demanded more, saying Ben hadn't increased queries enough. Gomes sent a letter to stating he was "deeply, deeply uncomfortable" with the ways that Google wanted to grow search— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan may be a computer scientist, but he joined Google in 2012 as a manager, working directly under CEO Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey man. Raghavan is a class traitor that deliberately ran out Ben Gomes, who worked on search for 19 years.— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Prabhakar Raghavan is a career failure, a man who has fallen upwards into the most important job in software, and since becoming head of search in 2020, Google has become an ultra-profitable and increasingly less-useful site. Raghavan is a villain. — Ed Zitron (@edzitron) April 23, 2024

Google replaced a founding member who was passionate about user experience for a guy who worked at Yahoo and caused Yahoo to make considerable losses financially, this explains perfectly why Google is a complete mess at the moment
This is a classic example of exactly what Steve Jobs said was the reason why monopolist companies die:

When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers – Steve Jobs

I need a little bit of help with my site please.
I recently did a migration to Wordpress. My site was doing really well before.
However, when we moved to Wordpress, unfortunately, my engineer did not account for the "/" at the end of wordpress URLs.
As in, rather than just go to settings and do a custom URL, they left the "/" which comes as a default on wordpress and set up redirects.
For every single article on the site. All 301s worked fine and all sitemaps were fine.
Right, we switched over and one day later we hike 8!!!! positions on Google search console. WOAH. And then, two days later it DIES. I'm talking average position 30 now. Effectively, my site is pretty dead. 10 years of work, poof! GONE.
I did audits upon audits and the only thing I found is that my internal URLs were also redirected. Fixed all of them 2 weeks ago.
My question is, will I ever recover from this, or that's it? I need to pivot and start a new site? Is there any other technical audit I can perform? Apart from screaming frog, SEMRush etc? Is there a silent killer on my site I should triple check? All is working on search console btw...everything seems just fine.
P.S. I think the reason why we hiked those 8 positions was because of the March core update, which is still ongoing. Then google realized we migrated, deindexed EVERYTHING and reindexed our new urls with basically average position 30. Thank you for your help.

Hello SEOs,

We are planning to move one of our e-commerce store from custom platform to Shopify, we have decent ranking and getting 10,000/month in summers and 20,000/month in winters. (all are category pages, no blogs)

Issue: If we move to shopify, we need to change all website URLs as per shopify format (adding "category" and "product" into URLs). Here are my questions;

1. We are expecting the ranking drops, so what should be the ideal time (duration) to get the rankings back (I know there are multiple things related to this, but consider all the implementation was done right here) -- I just want to calculate my expected drop in annual revenue.
2. What factors we need to consider (must) here beside apply 301 redirections

I want to target USA, UK, AU, CA with .com Domain, I have 2 option Either I can create subdirectory(Low cost, easy to maintain) or I can buy CCTLDs for each county(Higher Cost). Which is better, Can I get success with single domain with subdirectory in SEO to rank target keywords. Please suggest.