The experts who once contributed there have mostly stopped participating. What remains no longer reflects a real community. This is why the old sense of collective trust on Reddit has faded, and it can’t reliably represent what real users think or experience anymore.

When only a small group is effectively allowed to create content, the flow of information circulates inside a closed loop. In that kind of environment, the chances of misleading posts or biased recommendations naturally increase because the diversity of voices disappears.

My experience with Reddit has been very different from the idealized version people often describe. For years, an ordinary user has barely been able to post freely. Most attempts get removed almost immediately, and accounts are often banned without a clear reason.

9️⃣This misunderstanding between SEO and dev teams happens too often.
We need to stop chasing numbers and start focusing on site quality instead.

8️⃣ @johnmu.com, could you please clarify this misconception?
When “Crawled – not indexed” goes down, does it mean improvement?
Or usually that Googlebot has reduced its crawl interest?

7️⃣
Example from a real test:
Before → 24 of 69 resources blocked
After → 2 of 66
Yet the number of indexed pages didn’t grow at all

6️⃣The result:
Crawled – not indexed ↓
Indexed pages → (flat)
Googlebot simply crawls less, not smarter.
Crawl interest drops and rendering gets incomplete

5️⃣ They assume these rules save crawl budget or improve indexing.
But all it really does is stop Googlebot from visiting those areas, and that’s not a fix.

4️⃣ Example of what they block:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*.woff2$
Disallow: /*.woff$
Disallow: /*.ttf$
Disallow: /*.otf$

3️⃣ To make reports look cleaner, they start blocking key paths in robots.txt, thinking it helps optimize crawl budget.
In fact, it hides the real problem.

2️⃣ They believe that when this number drops, it means the site is improving.
But in reality, it often just means the number looks smaller, not that indexing got better.

Thanks, John , I’ve just sent you the domain details via DM.
Would really appreciate it if you could take a quick look. 🙏

But even considering that guidance, the migration still seems unusually slow this time.
Should we still expect the process to take several months, even when all redirects and signals are correctly in place?