Journal archive, screen 2
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Crawling and indexing
Robots.txt: The Complete Guide to Directives, Testing, and Common MistakesA robots.txt file tells crawlers which URLs on a host they may request. It is a crawl control, not an indexing control and not a security measure. Google's own introduction…
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Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Render-Blocking CSS: Critical CSS and Stylesheet Loading StrategiesCSS blocks rendering by design. web.dev's guide to extracting critical CSS says: "The browser must download and parse CSS files before it can show the page, which makes CSS a…
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Crawling and indexing
Redirect Errors, Chains & Loops: How to Find and Fix ThemA redirect sends a request for one URL to another. It fails as an SEO tool in four ways: it points to a destination that is irrelevant or broken, it…
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Analytics, reporting and testing
Rank Tracking: How to Set It Up and What the Numbers Really MeanA rank tracker reports where a URL appeared for a query in a specific simulated search: one location, one device, one language, at one moment. That is a useful, repeatable…
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Content strategy
Programmatic SEO: Building Pages at Scale Without Creating Thin ContentProgrammatic SEO means generating many pages from a template and a dataset: one page per city, product, integration, route, salary band or comparison. It is not spam by definition. Google's…
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Structured data
Product Schema and Merchant Listings: Price, Availability, and Reviews in SearchProduct structured data tells Google what a product page sells: the product's name and image, its price and availability, and its reviews or ratings. Google uses it for two classes…
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Crawling and indexing
Pagination and Canonical Tags: Google’s Current Approach to Multi-Page SeriesEach page in a paginated series should have its own URL and its own self-referencing canonical tag. Pointing page 2, page 3 and every later page to page 1 as…
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Crawling and indexing
Orphan Page Discovery and Fix: A Complete Technical GuideAn orphan page is a page that exists and is meant to be found, but that no other page on the site links to. Search engines and visitors can reach…
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Structured data
Organization, Person & Brand SchemaOrganization, Person and Brand markup tell search engines who stands behind a website: the company, the people who write or lead it, and the brands it sells. Google says that…
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Crawling and indexing
Mobile-First Indexing: How Google Crawls Mobile Pages and What Can Go WrongGoogle indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with its smartphone crawler. The transition to this system is finished: on October 31, 2023, Google announced that…
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Crawling and indexing
Meta Robots and X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, and Other Page-Level DirectivesPage-level robots directives tell search engines what they may do with a URL after they have fetched it: whether to index it, whether to use its links for discovery, and…
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Content strategy
Meta Description Optimization: A Complete GuideA meta description is a short summary of a page placed in its HTML head. Google may use it as the snippet under a result, or it may write its…
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Crawling and indexing
Log File Analysis for SEO: What Googlebot Is Actually Doing on Your SiteServer access logs record every request that reaches the server: which URLs search engine crawlers requested, when, and what the server answered. Search Console's Crawl Stats report summarizes Google's crawling,…
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Structured data
LocalBusiness Schema: The Properties That Matter and How to Implement ThemLocalBusiness structured data describes a physical business on its own website: its name, address, phone number, hours and location. Google's documentation says it can tell Google about "business hours, different…
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Local SEO
Local Pack Ranking Factors: How Google Ranks the Map ResultsGoogle ranks local results, the map pack in Search and listings in Maps, mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Its help page puts it this way: "Local results…
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Local SEO
Local Link Building: Earning Links from Your CommunityLocal link building is the part of link building that comes from being an active member of a place: the sponsorships, partnerships, events, memberships and local coverage that a business…
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Local SEO
Local Citations and NAP Consistency: What Still Matters in 2026A local citation is any listing of a business's name, address and phone number (NAP) on another website: directories, map platforms, industry associations, review sites, data aggregators. Citations matter in…
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Crawling and indexing
llms.txt: What It Is and Whether It Actually Mattersllms.txt is a proposed convention: a Markdown file, placed at a site's root or at a path within it, that gives AI agents a short summary of the site and…
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Link building
Link Building Guide: The Tactics That Actually Earn Links in 2026Links from other sites still matter to Google: its ranking systems guide says link analysis systems, including PageRank, help determine "what pages are about and which might be most helpful…
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Link building
Link Attributes: nofollow, sponsored, and ugc ExplainedLink attributes tell search engines something about the relationship behind a link. Google supports three values of the rel attribute for this purpose: sponsored for paid or advertising links, ugc…
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Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Causes and FixesLargest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for the largest image or text block in the viewport to render. Google's guidance is that "LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds…
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Keyword research
Keyword Difficulty Scores: What They Measure and Why Tools DisagreeA keyword difficulty score is a vendor's estimate of how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a query, expressed on a 0 to…
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Keyword research
Keyword Cannibalization: How to Detect It and Fix ItKeyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on the same site try to satisfy the same search intent, so that neither serves it as well as one page would,…
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Google Search features and policies
Intrusive Interstitials and Pop-ups: Google Search Risks and Safer AlternativesA pop-up is not a penalty. Google does not issue manual actions for newsletter overlays, and there is no "interstitial" entry in the list of manual action types. The risk…
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Migrations and international sites
International SEO Site Structure: ccTLD vs Subdomain vs SubfolderNo URL structure always ranks best internationally. Country-code domains, subdomains and subfolders each send different signals, cost different amounts to run and fit different organizations. Google's multi-regional guide lists the…