How to Fix a Site Hit by Multiple Algorithm Updates
A site that lost ground in several updates can have more than one problem, and a costly mistake is treating them as one and applying one fix. Recovery starts with...
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215 postsHelp Center SEO When Zendesk Owns Your Rankings
If your help center lives at yourcompany.zendesk.com, the pages that rank are on a hostname you don't own. That subdomain belongs to the vendor's domain; your brand in the URL...
How to Do SEO During a Website Redesign
A redesign can lose traffic through defects you can check for before and after launch, such as URLs that changed without a redirect, pages removed while they still earned links,...
How to Fix “Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag” in GSC
This status isn't an error, and for deliberate duplicates there is nothing to fix. Google's help for the Page indexing report describes it as a page marked as an alternate...
Cloudflare Is Caching Your Noindex Tags
You add noindex at your origin, and Google keeps treating the page as indexable. If Cloudflare is caching your HTML, the directive may be fine and the delivery at fault:...
Agency Said Traffic Is Up But Revenue Is Down
"Traffic up, revenue down" can look like one problem and turn out to be two stacked on top of each other: a measurement blind spot that hides organic's role in...
Google Is Treating Your Tabs as Hidden Content
Whether Google treats your tabs as hidden content turns on one question first: whether the text is already in the page when it loads. Google's spam policies list "accordion or...
How to Diagnose and Fix a Sudden Traffic Drop
Google's guide to debugging drops in Search traffic opens with a set of sketches that pair graph shapes with causes: a large drop from an algorithmic update or a site-wide...
How to Do SEO When Your Product IS the Content
When the asset is a tool, whether a calculator, a checker or an interactive app, a strong path to a search win runs through making the product itself reachable and...
Edge SEO: Implementing Changes at the CDN Layer
Edge SEO means changing what your site serves with code that runs on the CDN, between the visitor and your origin server, instead of waiting for an origin deploy. A...
How to Do SEO for Affiliate Sites Post-HCU
Start by correcting the premise: there's no standalone "helpful content update" left to escape. Google's guide to its ranking systems lists the helpful content system among its retired systems and...
How to Do SEO for Seasonal Businesses
Seasonal SEO is counter-cyclical: the work that can win a December peak happens in the spring and summer, because new pages and links need time to be found, crawled, indexed...
How to Do SEO for a Declining Industry
You can't rank your way to traffic for searches that are no longer happening. When a whole industry's demand is contracting, the constraint is less your position on the results...
How to Handle Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content is a canonicalization problem, not a penalty. Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and isn't a violation of its spam policies. The...
How to Do SEO for Franchise Businesses
Franchise SEO can fail on governance before it fails on technique. The franchisor owns the brand, the franchisee owns the local business, and both can publish pages, run Business Profiles...
How to Do SEO for Comparison Aggregator Sites
A comparison aggregator has to answer a question its own pages raise: if a searcher could get the same facts from the sites you pull from, why should your page...
How to Fix Faceted Navigation SEO Issues
Faceted navigation causes SEO problems when filters multiply URLs far faster than products. Google's faceted navigation guide says an implementation based on URL parameters can generate infinite URL spaces. That...
Core Web Vitals Green But Rankings Still Dropping
All-green Core Web Vitals and falling rankings isn't a contradiction; it is a clue. Passing Core Web Vitals is one input among others, and Google says good Core Web Vitals...
How to Leverage Log File Analysis for SEO Decisions
Server logs are the fullest record of what crawlers requested from your site, when they include your edge traffic: every URL, response code, timestamp and user agent. Search Console tells...
How to Do SEO for an E-commerce Product Page
A product page that hundreds of retailers also sell doesn't win on the manufacturer's description, because every competitor has the same text. It competes on what your version adds: a...
How to Create an SEO Roadmap That Gets Executive Buy-In
SEO roadmaps can get set aside when they are written in SEO. A plan that promises to "improve crawl budget" and "optimize Core Web Vitals" gives a CEO no way...
How to Handle SEO During a Website Migration
A migration's search risk starts with one question: do your URLs change? Google's site move guide covers moves where they do: HTTP to HTTPS, a new domain or merged domains,...
How to Do SEO for a Membership/Paywall Site
Google's spam policies set two conditions under which a paywall is not cloaking: Google can see the full content behind the paywall just like any person who has access to...
How to Do SEO for Comparison Pages (X vs Y)
A comparison page earns its place by being fair and factually defensible, not by declaring that you win everything. A buyer comparing two tools may be looking for the catch:...
Google Is Indexing Your Search Results Pages
Internal search results pages get indexed for a simple reason: they are crawlable URLs like any other. A search box that submits with a GET request turns every query into...