SEO field notes · newest first

SDC SEO

The timeline

229 posts

Why Soft 404s Are Worse Than Real 404s for SEO

A soft 404 is a URL that returns 200 OK while its content says there is nothing here: a removed-product page left up with a "no longer available" placeholder, an...

6 min read

Your Thank You Pages Are Ranking for Commercial Keywords

Post-conversion confirmation pages start ranking for commercial terms when three conditions line up: the page is indexable, it contains the product or service keyword, and it accumulates links, both internal...

6 min read

Agency Said Traffic Is Up But Revenue Is Down

"Traffic up, revenue flat" is almost never a single problem. It is two stacked on top of each other: an attribution blind spot that hides organic's contribution to conversions it...

6 min read

Mobile Rankings Tanked But Desktop Is Fine

When mobile positions collapse while desktop holds steady, you are not looking at a content or authority problem. You are looking at a mobile-specific experience failure that desktop never exposed....

6 min read

Comparison Tables That Win Featured Snippets

The table you think is "better" is exactly why you lose the table snippet. A 12-column matrix with every spec, footnote, and pricing tier is great for the user who...

6 min read

Competitors Are Stealing Your Brand Keywords

"Stealing" is doing too much work in that sentence. It hides two different problems with two different remedies. A rival bidding on your trademarked name in paid search is legal...

6 min read

Your Image Srcset Is Serving Googlebot the Smallest Version

Googlebot crawls and renders with a mobile-sized viewport, because mobile-first indexing is the default. A mobile viewport means your responsive srcset resolves to its smallest breakpoint, so the variant Google...

6 min read

Google Discovers Your Site But Won’t Index It

"Discovered - currently not indexed" is a verdict, not a bug. It means Google found the URL, through your sitemap or internal links, looked at what it knows so far,...

6 min read

You Deployed Noindex to Production: Now What

An accidental site-wide noindex is a technical removal, not a quality penalty, and that distinction governs everything about the recovery. Google did not decide your content was bad; it obeyed...

6 min read

Template Libraries as Organic Traffic Machines

A template library scales organic traffic by capturing a kind of query blog content cannot serve: the "I need this thing now" search, where the user wants a ready-to-use artifact...

6 min read

Why Changing Your CMS Broke Links You Never Touched

A platform migration changes URL structure in ways you did not plan, and that is why URLs you thought you preserved now return 404. Trailing-slash handling, default permalink and path...

6 min read

Core Web Vitals Green But Rankings Still Dropping

All-green Core Web Vitals and falling rankings is not a contradiction; it is a diagnosis. Passing CWV is a low-weight page-experience input that keeps you out of a hole, not...

6 min read

10 Free Chrome Extensions You Need for SEO

A lean set of free Chrome extensions turns the browser into a fast SEO scanning workstation: you can read a page's on-page structure, see keyword context in the SERP, check...

6 min read

SEO Career Paths: From Analyst to Director and Beyond

SEO has no standardized career ladder, which means progression has to be navigated deliberately rather than followed. The field forks at mid-level into two genuine tracks: a senior individual-contributor path...

6 min read