If you spend any time in Google Search Console, you’ve probably seen the dreaded “Crawled – currently not indexed” and “Discovered – currently not indexed” messages. Most advice blames technical issues or vague “content quality” problems—but in practice, these statuses are usually telling you something simpler and harsher: your site and pages lack enough authority to deserve indexing at scale.

What “Crawled – currently not indexed” means

When Google reports a URL as “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed,” a few important things are already true.

• Google knows the URL exists, either through sitemaps, links, or other discovery methods.

• For “crawled,” Google has already fetched the page and had the opportunity to render and evaluate it.

• The page is not excluded because of an obvious technical block like robots.txt, 404, or a noindex tag.

So these statuses are not primarily about crawl failures. They’re about prioritization. Google is effectively saying: “We see this page, but right now it isn’t worth a slot in the index.”

Authority is the real bottleneck

Most SEOs default to content and technical checklists: rewrite the copy, tweak headings, adjust internal links, and pass a new round of audits. Those can help, but they don’t explain why entire sections on low-authority domains remain stuck while similar content on strong domains sails straight into the index.

Indexation at scale is an authority decision:

• Domains and pages with meaningful link-based authority get crawled and indexed more aggressively.

• New or weak sites with few real backlinks naturally accumulate “crawled / discovered but not indexed” URLs because Google doesn’t yet trust that their content will satisfy users.

• Internal links only move authority around; if the entire domain is low-authority, you’re mostly just redistributing zero.

In other words, you can’t fix a systemic authority deficit with on-page tweaks alone.

The difference between “Discovered” and “Crawled”

It is still useful to distinguish the two main crawled errors statuses in GSC, because they describe different stages in that authority-driven prioritization.

• Discovered – currently not indexed: Google knows the URL exists but hasn’t fetched it yet. This usually points to low crawl priority, often on large or low-authority sites where Google is being selective with its resources.

• Crawled – currently not indexed: Google fetched and evaluated the page but chose not to include it in the index at this time, typically because the URL does not add enough unique value given the site’s overall authority and the competition.

Both are symptoms of the same underlying reality: Google is not convinced your pages deserve to be stored and surfaced.

Why “fixing content” often doesn’t fix the issue

Advice like “improve content quality” and “add internal links” is directionally right but incomplete.

Common pitfalls:

• Endless rewriting with no authority change: You can keep rewriting articles and adding sections, but if the domain’s authority doesn’t improve, Google still has little incentive to index the expanded content.

• Internal links from non-performing pages: Linking stuck pages together rarely helps if none of those pages have real rankings or external links; you are circulating low value within a closed system.

• Over-focusing on technical “health scores”: Passing audits in tools doesn’t equate to being index-worthy. The page can be technically perfect and still not get indexed if the domain lacks authority.

Content improvements matter most when layered on top of authority and user demand, not as a substitute for them.

What to actually do about it

If you care about the URLs that are stuck in “crawled / discovered but not indexed,” you need to treat this as an authority and prioritization problem first, and a page-level optimization problem second.

1. Strengthen the domain’s authority

   • Earn real backlinks from relevant, trustworthy sites.

   • Prioritize campaigns that drive links and mentions to core pages, then use those as hubs to link into weaker sections.

2. Promote and build up a few key entry points

   • Focus on turning a small set of pages into traffic and link magnets.

   • Once those pages hold authority and get traffic, use them to distribute internal links to the URLs currently not indexed.

3. Use GSC requests sparingly, as confirmation, not a strategy

   • After making substantial changes, you can request indexing once via URL inspection.

   • If authority and demand are still lacking, repeated requests won’t fix a systemic indexing pattern.

The post How to resolve Crawled – currently not Indexed appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

SEO awards recognize agencies, in-house teams, individuals, and software for measurable excellence in search engine optimization. The best SEO awards in 2026 are the Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards, the Search Engine Land Awards, and the UK Search Awards, ranked here on cost, judging rigour, and what a win is actually worth.

Disclosure: I won SEO Expert of the Year at the 2026 Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards. I’ve ranked it #1 anyway—the criteria below explain exactly why, and you are entirely welcome to re-score it yourself.

There is a version of SEO expertise you can fake with a polished slide deck and a couple of client logos. And then there is the version you can’t fake: showing up in the actual search results.

Unfortunately, the search engine results pages (SERPs) for industry awards have historically been 100% award operators marking their own homework. No one actually ranks these programs objectively based on hard metrics. To cut through the marketing fluff, this ranking evaluates programs using a strict methodology: Cost to compete (entry and mandatory ceremony fees), Judging rigour (data-verified vs. essay contests), Winner value (free badge rights vs. paywalls), and Transparency.

2026 SEO Awards Comparison

The Definitive Rankings of SEO Awards

1. The Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards

The Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards are the first zero-barrier, performance-first awards in the search industry. Entry is permanently free, eliminating the pay-to-play model that plagues the incumbent programs. The judging process is a robust 3-step system: initial pre-scoring, live data verification using tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console, and a final panel vote. With 8 named judges who are legally barred from entering themselves, and strict rules requiring founder-affiliated wins to be disclosed and recused, it represents the highest level of transparency in the space. Winners get a free, permanent badge that drives real authority. If you want your actual ranking data verified by hard metrics rather than a creative writing piece, this is the premier program to enter.

2. Search Engine Land Awards

The Search Engine Land Awards leverage the industry’s most respected editorial brand to provide massive authority. Entry fees range from $395 to $595, and judging is handled strictly by an editorial panel evaluating written applications. Spanning 19 distinct categories, it features the only major individual award that carries universal respect: Search Marketer of the Year. There is no bloated, mandatory gala dinner; instead, winners are announced digitally on October 26. The real prize here is the winner’s badge paired with editorial coverage on a DR91 domain. It’s an ideal fit for enterprise teams and established agencies looking for pure, unadulterated citation value from a trusted news source.

3. UK Search Awards

The UK Search Awards are the massive flagship event of the British search industry, operated via the Don’t Panic circuit. Entering costs between £220 and £365 +VAT, requiring a rigid 1,000-word written essay. A massive panel of over 50 judges uses a two-step process to filter through roughly 90 highly granular categories, including distinct Small and Large agency splits. While it offers an undeniable “gala moment” at the Troxy in London, be prepared for the commercial pressure—gala tables are sold entirely separately. It remains a top-tier networking environment for UK-based agencies who need regional prestige and a physical trophy to showcase to local clients.

4. US Search Awards

The US Search Awards apply the exact same standardized Don’t Panic template to the North American market. Entry fees run from $300 to $495, utilizing a massive panel of approximately 50 judges to grade written case studies. The program features a final deadline of July 16, culminating in a live physical ceremony on October 7. It provides a standardized framework for mid-to-large US agencies wanting a formalized badge and a glitzy night out for their team.

5. European Search Awards

The European Search Awards cater strictly to the pan-European search ecosystem, utilizing over 150 judges and holding IASC ‘Outstanding’ accreditation. Entry costs parallel the UK edition (£220–£365 +VAT). The 2026 cycle concluded on May 20 in Porto, with the 2027 cycle scheduled to open around December. It provides cross-border validation for agencies managing international, multi-lingual campaigns across the continent.

6. Global Search Awards

The Global Search Awards serve as the international edition of the Don’t Panic circuit, pitting global agencies against each other. Entry fees sit at the standard £220–£365 +VAT range, with the 2026 winners scheduled for announcement on September 23. Winners receive a digital badge and an Awards Trust Mark. It functions as a broad marketing stamp for large networks looking to validate global campaign management capability.

Note: Regional programs like the World SEO Awards, LATAM SEO Awards, and APAC & MENA variants also run on various schedules and scales, acting as localized shortlists for regional recognition.

Do SEO Awards Really Matter?

The short answer is yes—but not for the reasons most people think.

Historically, the search community viewed legacy awards with healthy skepticism. The biggest UK program runs nearly 90 categories with aggressive “5 entries for the price of 6” bundle pricing, and a cottage industry of specialized agencies exists solely to ghostwrite award submissions. Shockingly, none of the incumbent programs check a single live ranking or organic traffic metric before handing out a physical trophy. It was purely an exercise in creative writing and buying expensive gala tables.

However, the emergence of generative search engines in 2026 completely transformed what an award win is worth. Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and Google’s AI Overviews don’t rank agencies or experts based on vibes. They rely heavily on live retrieval, co-citation, and clear entity relationships across trusted independent domains.

When users ask chat assistants for the “best SEO experts” or “top search agencies in New York,” these AI systems scrape authority sources, index winner lists, and synthesize the data into direct answers. Winning an award from a digitally authoritative, verified program creates the exact structured data footprint that pushes your brand into AI Overviews. An award win isn’t just a shiny plastic trophy anymore; it’s a critical retrieval mechanism for AI search visibility.

Frequently Asked Questions about SEO Awards

What are the best SEO awards to enter in 2026?

The best options are the Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards for data-verified tracking, the Search Engine Land Awards for authoritative digital editorial coverage, and the UK/US Search Awards if you require regional client-facing prestige and a live gala event.

How much do SEO awards cost?

Entry fees range widely across the industry. Standard entry fees sit anywhere between $300 to $595 (or £220 to £365 +VAT) per single category submission. Physical gala events, ceremony tickets, and table bookings are billed as separate, additional costs.

Which SEO awards are free?

The Charles Floate Annual SEO Awards are permanently and completely free to enter. The program explicitly eliminates entry fees, application paywalls, and hidden costs to ensure rankings are based entirely on transparent search performance data rather than budget.

Who judges SEO awards?

Incumbent programs typically rely on large panels of 50 to 150 industry executives who evaluate 1,000-word written essays. In contrast, performance-focused programs combine peer panel voting with mandatory, live tool-based data verification of organic metrics.

The post The Best SEO Awards in 2026, Ranked (By Someone Who Won One) appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

The post The Hackers Guide to Reddit SEO [Video] appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

Reddit conversations also show strong interest in self-hosted and customizable tools, especially when teams want tighter control over workflows, data, and AI integrations. For SaaS companies, this reflects a broader shift toward operational efficiency, better customer experience, and platforms designed around specific business needs

The post Why you should build your own b2c crm for self-service saas companies via reddit​ appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

The post SEMRush Toxic Link Reports are FUD – its time to kill them! [video] appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

Sources: SEO Resources from Reddit | Top Threads, Influencers, Experts, Advice

Other Resources

• The Hackers Guide to Reddit SEO [Video]

The post Top SEO Influencers, Experts and People to Follow on Reddit appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

Reddit can support your SEO in two main ways. First, use it for research: subreddits like r/SEO reveal the exact language your audience uses, the questions they ask, and pain points you can turn into content topics. Second, Reddit threads now rank prominently in Google, so participating genuinely in relevant discussions can earn visibility and referral traffic. Links from Reddit are typically nofollow, so don’t expect direct ranking power, but brand mentions and traffic still matter. The key is to contribute value first and mention your site sparingly. Spammy self-promotion gets downvoted, removed, or banned quickly.

2. Are Reddit ads bad for SEO?

No, Reddit ads have no direct effect on your SEO, positive or negative. Paid advertising and organic search rankings operate independently, and Google has repeatedly confirmed that running ads doesn’t influence how your pages rank. That said, Reddit ads can indirectly help: they drive traffic, build brand awareness, and expose your content to communities that might later search for your brand, link to you, or mention you organically. Those secondary signals can benefit SEO over time. The only real risk is wasting budget on poorly targeted campaigns, since Redditors are famously skeptical of ads that feel inauthentic or pushy.

3. Does email marketing affect SEO?

Not directly. Emails aren’t crawled or indexed by Google, and clicks from email campaigns don’t count as ranking signals. However, email marketing supports SEO indirectly in meaningful ways. Sending new content to your list drives immediate traffic and engagement, which can lead to shares, backlinks, and brand searches, all of which do influence rankings. Email also brings returning visitors who tend to engage more deeply, improving behavioral signals. Many marketers use newsletters to amplify content that would otherwise take months to gain traction organically. Think of email as a distribution channel that feeds the signals SEO depends on.

4. How does SEO work?

SEO works by making your site easier for search engines to discover, understand, and trust. Search engines crawl the web, index pages, and rank them based on hundreds of signals. The core pillars are: technical SEO (making sure your site is crawlable, fast, and mobile-friendly), on-page SEO (creating content that matches what people search for, structured with clear titles and headings), and off-page SEO (earning backlinks and mentions that signal authority). When someone searches, Google matches their query intent against its index and surfaces the results it considers most relevant and trustworthy. SEO is the ongoing practice of improving those signals.

5. How long does it take to learn SEO?

You can grasp the fundamentals in one to three months of consistent study: keyword research, on-page optimization, basic technical concepts, and link building. Becoming genuinely competent, meaning you can audit a site and grow its traffic reliably, usually takes six to twelve months of hands-on practice. True expertise takes years, because SEO constantly changes with algorithm updates. The consensus among practitioners is that you can’t learn SEO from reading alone. Build a site, break things, test ideas, and watch real data. A month of experimenting on your own project teaches more than six months of tutorials.

6. How to do SEO?

Start with keyword research to find what your audience searches for, prioritizing terms with real intent and achievable competition. Then create content that answers those queries better than what currently ranks. Handle the technical basics: fast load times, mobile-friendliness, clean site structure, and proper indexing via Google Search Console. Optimize each page’s title tag, headings, and internal links. Finally, build authority by earning backlinks through genuinely useful content, digital PR, or partnerships. Measure everything with Search Console and analytics, then iterate. SEO isn’t a one-time task; it’s a repeating cycle of research, publish, measure, and improve over months.

7. How to get SEO clients?

The most reliable path is demonstrating results before asking for money. Build case studies, even on your own site or a friend’s business, showing real traffic growth. Then leverage that proof: answer questions in communities where business owners hang out, publish content about your niche, and ask satisfied clients for referrals, which drive most agency growth. Niching down helps enormously; “SEO for dentists” wins clients faster than “SEO for anyone.” Cold outreach works if it’s personalized, leading with a specific issue you found on their site. Avoid promising rankings; sell measurable outcomes like traffic, leads, and revenue instead.

8. How to improve SEO?

Start with an audit to find what’s holding you back. Common quick wins include: updating and expanding older content that’s slipping in rankings, fixing broken links and redirect chains, improving page speed, and adding internal links to important pages. Check Search Console for pages ranking on positions 5 through 15; these often need only small improvements to reach the first page. Improve titles and meta descriptions to lift click-through rates. Longer term, focus on covering topics comprehensively rather than chasing single keywords, and earn backlinks from relevant sites. Consistent, incremental improvement beats sporadic overhauls almost every time.

The post Your personal SEO Guide for Reddit appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

What Does EEAT Stand for?

EEAT—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness—started life as language for quality raters and content marketers to describe “does this look real, safe, and useful?” rather than a concrete signal in the ranking stack. It is a reviewer concept and a sanity check: a way for humans inside and outside Google to talk about whether a site feels like a genuine entity doing real work, or just thin spam stitched together for search.

EEAT Defined

That’s why I treat EEAT as impression, not props: people infer trust from the totality of your presence (entity clarity, brand footprint, depth of work, third‑party validation), not from whether you’ve sprinkled the letters E‑E‑A‑T across author bios and headings.primaryposition+5

Critically, EEAT is not a ranking model – as Google makes no secret of  – there’s no EEAT score, and not something Google or LLMs “detect” in the way many SEOs claim. Google cannot assign a global numeric EEAT score to trillions of documents; the guidelines are there to help humans judge test sets of results, not to attach permanent EEAT labels to your pages. Likewise, LLMs operate on token patterns and retrieval mechanics; they don’t see “authoritativeness” or “trust badges” as first‑class signals, only text and linked entities they can statistically relate to queries. So chasing EEAT audits, checkers, and mythical EEAT updates is, in my view, a category error: you’re optimizing for a narrative instead of the actual levers—crawl, indexation, PageRank, query intent, content coverage, and brand‑level trust in the real world.primaryposition+5

The practical use of EEAT, for me, is as a critical‑thinking lens: “If a human with the power to nuke spam or restore a false positive looked at this, would they feel it’s real, competent, and safe?” If the answer is yes, you don’t have an EEAT problem; you have a classic SEO and GEO problem: building discoverable, link‑worthy, retrievable content that connects real signals of trust to the queries and generative systems that matter

EEAT Research

• Google Clarifies EEEAT
• Google Says EEAT Is Not A Ranking Factor Nor A Thing That Factors Into Other Factors
• EEAT Discussions on Reddit

The post What is Google EEAT? appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

EEAT is a Google concept. Its been recycled as an SEO myth because GEO agencies know that Brand and Content Marketers are highly susceptible to it. Unfortunately, LLMs do not use E‑E‑A‑T, and treating E‑E‑A‑T as a ranking factor or something that can be detected for completely misunderstands how these systems work.

E‑E‑A‑T is a human narrative, not a machine signal

E‑E‑A‑T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) was invented as an SEO framework for human raters and content marketers, not as a concrete, machine‑readable ranking signal inside an LLM.
It is a story layer we tell ourselves about “quality,” but a model does not see “author bio”, “brand”, or “trust badges” as first‑class, explicit signals the way SEOs talk about them.

LLMs operate on token sequences and learned weights. They see probabilities over words and patterns, not a checklist that says “this page has experience” or “this author is authoritative.”
When people say “LLMs reward E‑E‑A‑T,” they’re retrofitting a human QA framework onto a statistical language model that has no idea those letters even exist.

AI/LLMs are not search engines

E‑E‑A‑T was always framed in the context of search: crawlers, indexes, ranking systems, and evaluators judging page quality. LLMs, by contrast, are generative models. They:

• Do not crawl the web in real time.

• Do not maintain a link graph and run a ranking algorithm like PageRank.

• Do not “score” a URL and store an E‑E‑A‑T value for it.

They generate the next token based on the distribution learned during training. Any retrieval layer on top (RAG, GEO, QFO, etc.) uses an external search/index system to fetch documents, but the model itself is not doing what Google Search does.
If the underlying engine is not a search engine, importing a search‑quality framework like E‑E‑A‑T into it is a category error.

What GEOs actually look for

During pre‑training, LLMs are optimized to reduce prediction error: given a sequence of tokens, predict the most likely next token. That is all. There is no slot in that objective for “expertise” or “author name”, only patterns that correlate with them in text.
If pages that read like expert content are common and consistent in the training data, the model will mimic that style and structure – not because it values E‑E‑A‑T, but because those patterns reduce loss.

During alignment (RLHF, RLAIF), models are nudged toward being “helpful,” “honest,” and “harmless,” but again this is framed as reward signals over outputs, not as “go find the most authoritative cardiologist’s blog.”
The model learns that answers that sound more cautious, cite sources, or hedge around medical and legal advice get rewarded. That is not E‑E‑A‑T, it is pattern‑reinforced style.

Retrieval is not E‑E‑A‑T scoring

When an LLM interface does retrieval (Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT browsing, Gemini with search), that retrieval layer usually relies on:

• A traditional search index (Google/Bing or BraveSearch for example).

• A vector index over content chunks.

Those systems may have their own scoring functions (BM25, PageRank, embedding similarity, freshness, simple site‑level heuristics), but none of that is “E‑E‑A‑T” in the SEO‑blog sense.
The retriever is trying to surface documents that look textually relevant and sometimes fresh; the LLM is then summarizing or synthesizing those snippets. At no point does it need a concept like “this author has 20 years’ experience, give them +10% rank.”

E‑E‑A‑T is a narrative we lay over a complex set of retrieval, ranking, and quality systems in Google. Importing that same narrative into LLM retrieval is projection.

Why “E‑E‑A‑T SEO for GEO” is marketing fiction

A lot of content around “how to build E‑E‑A‑T for AI Overviews / LLMs” does the same thing over and over: take a fuzzy idea and expand it into a full mythos because it’s easy to sell.
Instead of saying “LLMs don’t care about your author bios; they care if your content is in the index they use and matches the decomposed queries,” people bolt E‑E‑A‑T onto everything because it feels like a unifying theory.

The reality:

• LLMs need inputs that are retrievable via query fan‑out and embedding similarity, not pages blessed with E‑E‑A‑T.

• They sample passages that best match the decomposed intents; they do not check whether your “About” page proves you are a doctor.

• They hallucinate confidently regardless of whether the underlying source is “authoritative” by human standards. That alone should destroy the myth that E‑E‑A‑T is in play.

“E‑E‑A‑T for LLMs” mostly translates into: write clear, specific, well‑scoped content that fits the fan‑out queries and is easy to chunk and retrieve. That is about structure and coverage, not about brand reputation signals.

The real levers for LLM visibility

LLM layers rely heavily on existing search infrastructure for discovery and retrieval, so traditional crawlability, internal linking, and basic SEO hygiene still matter. None of these require belief in E‑E‑A‑T as a thing LLMs “use.” They require understanding how queries get expanded, how chunks get embedded, and how retrieval pipelines feed the model. The work now is not “building E‑E‑A‑T for LLMs.” It is understanding how your content gets pulled into query fan‑out pipelines and making sure it is the cleanest, clearest, most directly useful input those systems can find.

The post How does EEAT fit into GEO/AEO and AI/LLMs appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.

The post Understanding Sitemap Optimization for SEO appeared first on Primary Position SEO NYC.