SEO & Growth
Search, indexing, and growth engineering for content sites. 20 posts.
E-E-A-T for Niche Directories: Signals You Can Ship
E-E-A-T signals a niche directory can actually ship: verifiable data with timestamps, a methodology page, editorial policy, and honest authorship.
SEO & GrowthGetting 50,000 Pages Crawled: Crawl Budget in Practice
What it takes to get 50,000 pages crawled: log-file analysis, the discovered-not-indexed funnel, and why pruning weak pages speeds up the rest.
SEO & GrowthSEO Split-Testing on a Static Site
How to run SEO split tests on a static site: page buckets at build time, difference-in-differences on Search Console clicks, and real sample sizes.
SEO & GrowthDuplicate Content: Diagnosis Before Medicine
There is no duplicate content penalty. How to diagnose exact, near, and cross-domain duplication with hashes and Search Console before prescribing fixes.
SEO & GrowthLink Building for Developer Tools: What Works in 2026
Guest posts are dead for developer tools. What still earns links in 2026: free engineering utilities, data studies, and open-source presence.
SEO & GrowthMeasuring SEO With Self-Hosted Analytics
Measuring SEO with self-hosted analytics — Plausible, Umami, or Matomo paired with Search Console, and the events worth tracking on content sites.
SEO & GrowthMeta Descriptions in the AI-Snippet Era
Google rewrites most meta descriptions. When yours survives the rewrite, what AI snippets changed, and formulas for writing them at programmatic scale.
SEO & GrowthSite Migrations Without Losing Rankings: A Field Checklist
A field checklist for site migrations — build the redirect map from traffic and links, stage the cutover, and watch the right reports for 90 days.
SEO & GrowthCanonical URLs: Eight Edge Cases That Bite
Eight canonical URL edge cases that break indexing — trailing slashes, parameters, pagination, syndication, noindex conflicts — and the fix for each.
SEO & GrowthContent Freshness: What dateModified Actually Does
What dateModified really does for rankings, how Google detects fake freshness, and a hash-based build step that earns the update signal honestly.
SEO & GrowthAnatomy of a Comparison Page That Ranks
The comparison page format that ranks — verdict in the first paragraph, a spec table above the fold, one URL per pair, and schema that validates.
SEO & GrowthLong-Tail Keyword Research With Zero Budget
Long-tail keyword research without paid tools — mine Search Console, script Google Autocomplete, scrape forums, and cluster by intent. Commands included.
SEO & GrowthRobots.txt for AI Crawlers: Block, Allow, or Negotiate?
An inventory of GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and friends, what blocking each one actually costs you, and a sane default robots.txt for AI crawlers.
SEO & GrowthGEO: How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews
How AI answer engines choose citations — crawler access, chunkable answer-first content, entity clarity, and what llms.txt does and doesn't do.
SEO & GrowthCore Web Vitals on Static Sites: Winning the Last 10%
Static sites pass Core Web Vitals until fonts, hero images, or third-party scripts break them. Five concrete fixes that win the last 10% at p75.
SEO & GrowthXML Sitemaps Past 50,000 URLs: Sharding Without Tears
Sitemap limits are 50,000 URLs and 50MB per file. How to shard by template, keep lastmod honest, and turn sitemaps into an indexation dashboard.
SEO & GrowthJSON-LD That Actually Moves the Needle (and the Schema That Doesn't)
Which JSON-LD types still earn rich results in 2026, which are decorative, and the validation traps that silently void your markup on every page.
SEO & GrowthInternal Linking at Scale: An Architecture That Compounds
The internal linking architecture for 50,000-page sites — hub-and-spoke plus an entity mesh, anchor discipline, and a build step that kills orphans.
SEO & GrowthThin Content at Scale: Why Google Ignores 40,000 of Your Pages
Partial indexing on template sites is a pattern-level verdict, not a page bug. How to diagnose it in Search Console and the levers that fix it.
SEO & GrowthProgrammatic SEO in 2026: The Complete Playbook
How to turn structured data into thousands of pages that actually rank — page archetypes, quality thresholds, and the mistakes that get sites deindexed.