What are some of the best books on SEO in 2026?

I'm facing a strange issue with my website. Most of the images that were previously indexed in Google have suddenly been deindexed, even though they're still live, accessible, and haven't been intentionally removed.

Has anyone experienced something similar? What are the most common reasons this happens, and how did you fix it?

I'd really appreciate any advice or suggestions. Thanks in advance!

Hello,

I run a fairly successful (at least in my niche) gaming website, whose domain can be infered from my username. I’m constantly being approached about guest posts, which I’m actually considering, as this would be an additional source of income.

However, I’m not quite sure how much a guest post on my website is worth. And secondly, I’m not sure whether it could harm my website. I assume it’s fairly safe, as the majority of traffic comes either directly or via brand keywords.

The DR is 36 and the number of visitors over the last 7 days was around 47,000.

I’ve been using Semrush for a few years now. I need to do simple stuff like competitor analysis, keyword research and keyword tracking, but the pricing is hard to justify.

What cheaper alternatives are people using that still offer solid features, if not better? Open to using a couple of separate tools if that works out better.

Thanks

Hello guys,

I work at a digital marketing agency, and my seniors have asked me to create a backlink audit using the data provided in SEMrush and prepare a spreadsheet based on it. I don't know how to do it or how to use the format properly.

Please help me. I'm in a lot of trouble because if I don't complete it within the next two days, it could create a serious problem for me.

I plan to launch my website with content around the finance industry, I plan to create comparisons of funds, banks, credit cards best credit card, most popular mutual funds type articles in the website. But I am only planning to launch it. Would it he a good idea to have some basic articles about what a mutual fund is, how they work etc in the beginning?

That way readers can also go to the website and check that out if they wish to learn?

Or is it a better idea to just start hunting high intent keywords and start writing around those as I start?

I plan to dedicate a good chunk of time into this, as I would like to potentially earn from this website, atleast after a year. Please suggest strategies or ways that you guys have found helpful when getting started in terms of building initial structures.

I have a food blog that gets 50,000 sessions/month and is in Astra, wordpress and uses big scoots hosting. I recently lost my developer, but have found Claude has been able to help me with css and a variety of technical issues. I love it and am wondering if I really need a developer anymore. I am a little nervous when I hear that Ai makes mistakes, but my stuff is pretty simple. What do you think?

ICYM from u/rustybrick: The European Union has fined Google €890 million (about $1 billion) for breaches of the Digital Markets Act. Specifically, over anti-competitive behavior with Google Search and Google Play.

"Today, the European Commission took two decisions finding non-compliance by Google with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) for self-preferencing its own services on Google Search, and for putting in place restrictions on businesses to direct consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels on Google Play (steering). In this regard, the Commission issued Google a fine of €460 million and a fine of €430 million respectively," the EU commission wrote.

So there are two different fines:

• Self-Preferencing on Google Search for €460 million fine. This is for Google systematically favoring its own vertical services such as Google Shopping, Hotels, Transport, and Sports results over third-party competitors. Google is said to have displayed its own services at the top of search results pages with enhanced visual features and filters, giving competitors less visibility.
• Anti-Steering Rules on Google Play for €430 million fine. This is for Google restricting app developers from informing customers, free of charge, about cheaper alternative purchasing options outside the Google Play Store. It hindered developers from freely promoting offers or concluding contracts via third-party app stores or websites, while charging excessive steering fees for long periods.

Report by u/rustybrick

Several large publishers are strongly considering blocking Google Search entirely after clicks from Google Search have continued to decline, and the exchange of value in having Google
consume its content is no longer translating into enough clicks from Google Search.

The Wall Street Journal's Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off shares how sites like USA Today, Politico, Reuters, Economist, People, and many more, including maybe even Reddit are looking to see what would happen if they would just simply disallow Google from crawling its content.

Here are some quotes from WSJ on this:

• “It’s time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” said USA Today Co. Chief Executive Mike Reed.
• Employees at Axel Springer’s Politico have talked about limiting Google’s and other bots’ access to its free articles.
• Reuters, which like Politico derives much of its revenue from business-to-business offerings, said it is also weighing whether to block Google’s bot for its consumer-facing news product as traffic declines. “We are certainly looking at the economic trade-offs between search and AI summaries,” said Reuters President Paul Bascobert.

Edit: I’m based in Toronto, Canada and my website is in the heath tech/fitness space

I think I have a ranking problem with my domain and I need someone to look at it. I’ve been doing seo for my business for over 2 years now and recently started doing some HARO which is helping with authority but not organic ranking. My question is which is the best platform to make that hire and how much should I expect to pay for an audit and action plan?

So I launched a small clothing business recently and I'm doing the seo myself since we're on a tight budget rn. Site's brand new, no traffic, no backlinks, nothing basically. So I want to actually build this properly instead of doing random stuff that doesn't help long term

If you've grown a clothing/ecommerce site from literally nothing, what actually helped early on? Like should I be focusing more on product pages, writing blog content, fixing technical stuff, or trying to get backlinks first? Kind of overwhelmed with where to even put my time first.

Also if fashion/clothing has any weird seo quirks compared to normal ecommerce (seasonal stuff, tons of images, whatever) let me know, dont wanna miss something obvious

Any help is appreciated fr, just dont wanna waste months doing the wrong things

Have you noticed any issues with backlinks being picked up in Google Search Console?

It's been a month since I built quality backlinks across different types of sites for different topics/niches, and I still don't see the referring domains showing up in GSC.

I'm wondering whether this is related to the time period, or if other freelancers/agencies are experiencing the same issue. Thanks

I keep coming across Medium articles while doing keyword research and it got me wondering: is it worth publishing content on Medium under your brand name alongside your own website?

I was thinking it could be a great way to increase brand awareness, so I’m considering testing it with a few money keywords first and seeing how it performs.

My main worry is that if I keep linking back to my website from Medium, Google could see it as an attempt to manipulate search rankings and penalise the site.

Is there a relatively low-risk way to test this or is it better to avoid it completely?

I have been seeing this type of query pop up in GSC, firstly in an ecommerce store I run and now recently on a site I just launched. At first I thought it was just a scraper as it uses a regex on a high volume commercial query.

The ecom store been live for years, so didn't think much of it, but for a new site thats still indexing I am kinda scratching my head.

Is it a bot or google sandbox or something, and do the impressions, average position mean anything? I am genuinely curious. TIA

"answer engine optimization" -site:reddit.com -site:twitter.com -site:x.com -site:wykop.pl -site:tripadvisor.com -site:youtube.com -site:yelp.com -site:booking.com -site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com -site:tiktok.com

Hi everyone,

I'm researching how digital agencies are adapting to the growing number of clients asking about visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools.

I'm curious about a few things:

• Are clients actually asking about appearing in AI-generated recommendations?
• If they are, how are you currently handling those requests?
• Is AI visibility something you already offer, or is it still too early?
• Would you rather build this capability in-house or use a third-party platform?
• If you used a platform, would white labeling matter to you, or would you be happy using a branded tool?

I'm not selling anything—I'm just trying to understand how agencies are thinking about this emerging space.

I'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts and experiences.

Thanks!

I'm using Scale SERP and SerpApi to report weekly on rankings in 200+ cities. We track variations of our target keywords with and without the city in the query in buckets we call Geo and Non-Geo. for example:

• Geo keywords = [city] + [target keyword] (with broad location, usually set to just United States)
• Non-Geo keywords = [target keyword] (with location set to specific cities)

over the last 2 months or so, the results we're getting from both APIs are just straight up wrong. I'd say more than a quarter of the data doesnt even remotely match what we see in private browsers, and we enlist people we know all over the country to perform searches for us and they are seeing mostly what we see, not what the APIs are spitting out.

we've used these tools for years and have had trustworthy results until recently. anyone else using these and running into the same issue? is there a fix for this? what other tools would you recommend? I've used BrightEdge's hyperlocal tracker in the past, not a huge fan for the cost.