A journal of search optimization, filed by topic
Working guides on crawling, page speed, structured data, content, links, local and AI search, each citing the documentation it rests on. Open a topic below or search the journal.
- 99 guides
- 12 topics
Technical SEO
- 404 Errors: When to Fix, Redirect, or Leave Them Alone
- 5xx Server Errors: How They Affect Crawling and How to Fix Them
- AI Crawlers and User-Agent Tokens: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and Which to Block
- Crawl Budget: When It Actually Matters and How to Fix It
- Google Search Console Indexing Issues: A Guide to the Page Indexing Report
- How to Use the Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool
- llms.txt: What It Is and Whether It Actually Matters
- Log File Analysis for SEO: What Googlebot Is Actually Doing on Your Site
- Meta Robots and X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, and Other Page-Level Directives
- Mobile-First Indexing: How Google Crawls Mobile Pages and What Can Go Wrong
- Orphan Page Discovery and Fix: A Complete Technical Guide
- Pagination and Canonical Tags: Google’s Current Approach to Multi-Page Series
- Redirect Errors, Chains & Loops: How to Find and Fix Them
- Robots.txt: The Complete Guide to Directives, Testing, and Common Mistakes
- Technical SEO Audit Checklist
- XML Sitemaps: Structure, Limits, and Common Mistakes
- CDN for SEO: When a Content Delivery Network Helps and When It Doesn’t
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Causes and Fixes
- Google Tag Manager Performance: How Tags Slow Pages Down and How to Fix It
- Image Optimization: Formats, Compression, and Lazy Loading Done Right
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Causes and Fixes
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Causes and Fixes
- Render-Blocking CSS: Critical CSS and Stylesheet Loading Strategies
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): Server Response Time and How to Reduce It
- Web Font Optimization: Loading Fonts Without Hurting Performance
- Webpack Optimization for SEO: Bundle Size, Code Splitting, and Loading Performance
- Article Schema: Headline, Author, and Date Markup for Publishers
- BreadcrumbList Schema: Implementation and How Breadcrumbs Appear in Search
- FAQ Content and FAQPage Schema: A Practical Guide
- LocalBusiness Schema: The Properties That Matter and How to Implement Them
- Organization, Person & Brand Schema
- Product Schema and Merchant Listings: Price, Availability, and Reviews in Search
- Sitelinks and Site Navigation: What Schema Can and Can’t Do
- Structured Data Troubleshooting & Validation
- Video Sitemap Optimization Guide
Content, keywords and links
- AI-Generated Content and Google: What the Policies Actually Say
- Contact Page SEO Optimization
- Content Briefs: A Template Writers Can Actually Use
- Content Update Strategy: How to Refresh Old Articles for Better Rankings
- E-E-A-T Signals: How to Demonstrate Experience and Expertise on the Page
- Evergreen vs Trending Content: How to Decide What to Publish
- How Long Should Your Content Be? A Depth-First Framework, Not a Word Count Target
- Meta Description Optimization: A Complete Guide
- Programmatic SEO: Building Pages at Scale Without Creating Thin Content
- Running a Content Program: KPIs, Team Workflow, and Measurement Beyond Any Single Article
- SEO Might Be Dying, But the Best Content Never Will
- Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages: Planning Content for Topical Authority
- Web Accessibility and SEO: Where They Overlap and Where They Don’t
- Branded vs Non-Branded Keywords: Why the Split Matters for SEO Strategy
- Commercial Intent Keywords: How to Classify and Prioritize by Buying Stage
- How to Read Search Volume Data (and When It’s Lying to You)
- Keyword Cannibalization: How to Detect It and Fix It
- Keyword Difficulty Scores: What They Measure and Why Tools Disagree
- SERP Analysis: Reading the Results Page Before You Write a Word
- Broken Link Building: Finding Opportunities and Writing Outreach That Works
- Digital PR for Links: Campaign Types That Earn Coverage
- Guest Posting in 2026: When It Works and When It’s a Risk
- How to Vet a Link Opportunity Before You Pursue It
- Internal Linking Strategy: Anchor Text, Site Architecture, and Link Equity Flow
- Link Attributes: nofollow, sponsored, and ugc Explained
- Link Building Guide: The Tactics That Actually Earn Links in 2026
- Toxic Backlinks and the Disavow Tool: When to Act and When to Ignore
- Unlinked Brand Mentions: Turning Mentions into Backlinks
Local, AI and Google features
- Apple Business and Bing Places: Managing Your Local Listings Beyond Google
- City-Based SEO: A Comprehensive Guide Using Nashville as a Case Study
- Google Business Profile Optimization: Setup, Categories, and Profile Completeness
- Google Reviews Strategy: Getting, Responding to, and Leveraging Reviews
- Local Citations and NAP Consistency: What Still Matters in 2026
- Local Link Building: Earning Links from Your Community
- Local Pack Ranking Factors: How Google Ranks the Map Results
- Featured Snippets: How to Win Them and When They Cost You Clicks
- Google Core Updates: How to Diagnose Traffic Loss and Plan a Response
- Google Discover Optimization: How Content Gets Picked Up
- Google Knowledge Panels: Eligibility, Verification, and How to Claim One
- Google Manual Actions: Types, Causes, and How to Submit a Reconsideration Request
- Google News SEO: Requirements and Getting Into Top Stories
- Google Spam Policies Explained: Scaled Content, Site Reputation Abuse, and Expired Domains
- Intrusive Interstitials and Pop-ups: Google Search Risks and Safer Alternatives
- Visibility in Google Images and Google Lens
- YouTube SEO: Ranking Videos on YouTube and in Google
Measuring and running SEO
- Bing Webmaster Tools: Setup and the Reports That Actually Matter
- Google Analytics 4 Setup and Configuration Guide
- Google Search Console Performance Report: Reading Queries, Clicks, CTR, and Position
- Rank Tracking: How to Set It Up and What the Numbers Really Mean
- SEO A/B Testing: How to Run Split Tests on Page Templates
- SEO Forecasting: Estimating Traffic and ROI Before You Invest
- SEO Reporting: What Belongs in a Monthly Report and What Doesn’t
- Why Google Search Console and GA4 Numbers Don’t Match
New in the journal
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Google Search features and policies
YouTube SEO: Ranking Videos on YouTube and in GoogleA YouTube video can be found in two different systems: YouTube's own search and recommendations, and Google Search (including video results and Discover). They overlap but work differently. YouTube says…
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Crawling and indexing
XML Sitemaps: Structure, Limits, and Common MistakesAn XML sitemap is a list of URLs you want search engines to know about, with optional details such as when each page last changed. It helps discovery; Google's sitemap…
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Hiring and budgeting for SEO
Why Your SEO Isn’t Working: The Real Reasons Behind Zero TrafficWhen a site gets little or no organic traffic, the cause can be found by checking a short sequence of possibilities in order: whether Google can find and index the…
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Analytics, reporting and testing
Why Google Search Console and GA4 Numbers Don’t MatchSearch Console clicks and GA4 organic sessions measure different things, collected by different systems, at different moments, under different rules. A Search Console click is recorded by Google when someone…
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Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Webpack Optimization for SEO: Bundle Size, Code Splitting, and Loading PerformanceWebpack is a build tool. It has no direct relationship with search rankings, and no search engine documents a "Webpack factor". Its relevance to SEO is indirect but real: the…
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Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Web Font Optimization: Loading Fonts Without Hurting PerformanceWeb fonts affect two things users notice: when text first appears and whether it jumps when the final font arrives. A font loaded late can hold text invisible or force…
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Content strategy
Web Accessibility and SEO: Where They Overlap and Where They Don’tAccessibility and SEO share a lot of ground because both depend on content that machines can read and structure that makes sense without seeing the page. Descriptive alt text, real…
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Google Search features and policies
Visibility in Google Images and Google LensImages can be found in two ways on Google: people type a query and browse Google Images, or they search with an image itself through Google Lens, Circle to Search,…
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Structured data
Video Sitemap Optimization GuideA video sitemap adds information about videos to an ordinary XML sitemap: where the thumbnail is, what the video is called, what it is about, and where Google can fetch…
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Link building
Unlinked Brand Mentions: Turning Mentions into BacklinksAn unlinked brand mention is a page that names your organization, product or people without linking to your site. Some of these are worth a polite request for a link,…
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AI search
Tracking AI Search Traffic in GA4: Referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and OthersGA4 can show sessions that arrive from AI assistants when the visit carries an identifiable referrer or campaign tag. Google Analytics now does part of this automatically: its default channel…
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Link building
Toxic Backlinks and the Disavow Tool: When to Act and When to IgnoreDisavowing links is the exception, not routine maintenance. Google's own help page for the disavow tool says that "In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional…
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Content strategy
Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages: Planning Content for Topical AuthorityA topic cluster is a way of organizing content: one hub page (called a pillar in some SEO writing) gives an overview of a broad topic, and a set of…
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Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Time to First Byte (TTFB): Server Response Time and How to Reduce ItTime to First Byte is the time from when a user starts navigating to a page until the browser receives the first byte of the HTML response. It is not…
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Crawling and indexing
Technical SEO Audit ChecklistA technical SEO audit answers one question: can search engines discover, crawl, render and index the pages a site wants in search, and is anything technical holding those pages back?…
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Structured data
Structured Data Troubleshooting & ValidationStructured data can pass every validator and still never produce a rich result. That is not a bug in the validator; it is three different questions being answered by three…
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Structured data
Sitelinks and Site Navigation: What Schema Can and Can’t DoNo structured data type controls which sitelinks Google shows. Google's sitelinks documentation says "At the moment, sitelinks are automated": its systems analyze a site's link structure to find shortcuts, and…
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Migrations and international sites
Site Migration SEO: Domain Changes, Platform Switches, and Redesigns Without Losing RankingsNo migration plan can guarantee that rankings and traffic stay where they were. Google's site move guide says to "expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move" while Google…
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Keyword research
SERP Analysis: Reading the Results Page Before You Write a WordThe results page for a query is the most direct evidence of what kind of answer a search engine currently shows for it. Reading it before writing tells you which…
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AI search
SEO vs GEO vs AEO: What’s Actually Different in AI Search OptimizationSEO, GEO and AEO are three names for overlapping work, not three separate systems you can optimize for independently. SEO (search engine optimization) is the established practice of making pages…
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Analytics, reporting and testing
SEO Reporting: What Belongs in a Monthly Report and What Doesn’tA monthly SEO report should answer three questions for the people who pay for the work: did organic search contribute to the business this month, what changed and why, and…
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Content strategy
SEO Might Be Dying, But the Best Content Never WillThe headline is a provocation, not a finding. What the evidence shows is narrower: the ways people reach information are changing, with AI-generated answers inside search engines and assistants that…
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Analytics, reporting and testing
SEO Forecasting: Estimating Traffic and ROI Before You InvestAn SEO forecast is a conditional estimate: if these pages reach these positions for queries with this much demand, and if visitors convert at this rate, then the investment returns…
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Analytics, reporting and testing
SEO A/B Testing: How to Run Split Tests on Page TemplatesAn SEO split test changes a group of pages and compares their search performance with a similar group left unchanged. It is not the same as the A/B testing used…
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Content strategy
Running a Content Program: KPIs, Team Workflow, and Measurement Beyond Any Single ArticleA content program is the system that decides what to publish, produces it to a standard, keeps it accurate and measures whether the whole portfolio is doing its job. Individual…