SEO field notes · newest first
Capacity planning is a constraint that pushes a team toward real prioritization. SEO work has no natural end: there is always another page to improve, another competitor to study, another...
Site architecture is how your pages are organized and connected: the hierarchy that places pages under categories, the URL paths that express that hierarchy, and the internal links that join...
Google documents very little that is specific to voice, and that tells you where the work is. The voice-specific feature in its structured data guidance, speakable, covers news articles read...
Freshness depends on the query. Google's guide to its ranking systems describes "query deserves freshness" systems designed to show fresher content for queries where it would be expected. Its two...
A featured snippet is a search result with its format flipped: Google shows the extracted answer first, in a box above the regular listings, and the page title and link...
To a web server, /page and /page/ are two different URLs. Google's post To slash or not to slash (April 2010) says Google treats each of them separately, and equally,...
Documentation earns its keep when following it is cheaper and safer than doing the work from memory. Building for completeness can work against that test. Pages nobody opens still need...
Last-click attribution undervalues SEO whenever organic search opens a journey that another channel closes. A buyer finds you through an informational search, comes back later through a branded search or...
Before you build a disavow file, establish whether the attack did anything. Google's guidance on disavowing links says that in most cases Google can assess which links to trust without...
Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites to yours. Links matter because they are a main way people, and search engines, move between sites: an editorial...
For Google, the debate has an official answer. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI search says that from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for...
At enterprise scale, the difficulty can shift from knowing what to do to getting it done across dozens of teams with their own priorities, their own backlogs and no obligation...
Infinite scroll hides content from Google when the next batch of items loads only because someone scrolled. Google's guide to pagination and incremental page loading says its crawlers don't click...
When geo-IP detection or geo-redirects run at your origin behind a location-blind CDN, two failures can stack. The edge caches one country's response, or one redirect outcome, under the URL...
A working SEO stack follows one central rule: one source of truth per data type. Assemble tools for complementary coverage and clean data flow, not to own every category twice;...
The same English page can sit at position 3 in the United States, on page two in the United Kingdom and nowhere in Australia, and that need not be a...
Everything after the # in a URL is a fragment, and the browser doesn't send it to the server. So when a filter lives after the hash, /properties#bedrooms=3 and /properties#city=seattle...
Start with how Google builds the text under your result. Its documentation on snippets says Google primarily uses the content on the page to determine the snippet automatically, and may...
When a client's report shows organic rankings up and map pack positions flat, the work may not have failed; it may have landed on the other result type. Google says...
For SEO, the rendering choice turns first on one question: is the page's content in the HTML the server sends, or does it appear only after JavaScript runs in a...
When a page's main content is built by JavaScript, every script that content waits on becomes part of what has to go right for Google to see it. Analytics tags,...
A brief that produces first-draft-ready work sits between direction and prescription: enough direction that a competent writer can work without guessing, not so much that the draft reads like a...
What the title calls dead is a specific business model: publishing top-of-funnel explainers mainly to capture search clicks, then counting those clicks as the return. When an AI Overview or...
When a staging copy of your site shows up in search instead of production, two things have gone wrong at once. Staging got into Google's index, and when Google compared...
Competitive SEO response is triage, not reflex. When a competitor publishes a new hub, ships a technical change or picks up a burst of links, the first action is not...