Crawling, indexing, performance, and the architecture behind search visibility.
59 field notes · Page 1 of 5
Most SEOs treat robots.txt like a simple gatekeeping file — add a few Disallow lines, call it done. That mental model breaks under the weight of a real enterprise site. I've audited…
Read the field note ↗The naive view of XML sitemaps: list your URLs, submit to GSC, done. The reality on a site with 500,000+ pages, multiple content types, international variants, and a publishing CMS…
Read the field note ↗Crawl budget is one of the most misunderstood concepts in technical SEO. It's not a number you're allocated, it's not a dial you can turn in GSC, and it's not equally important for…
Read the field note ↗Log file analysis is the closest thing technical SEO has to a ground truth. Every other data source — GSC, third-party crawlers, analytics — is either sampled, filtered, or reports…
Read the field note ↗Some technical SEO issues fail loudly: a misconfigured robots.txt blocks the entire site, a server throws 500s, a sitemap breaks. Those get noticed and fixed. The insidious issues…
Read the field note ↗Canonical tags are simultaneously one of the most powerful and most misused signals in technical SEO. A single misplaced rel="canonical" can silently drain crawl budget, consolidate…
Read the field note ↗Hreflang is the specification that most international SEO implementations get wrong, not because the concept is hard, but because the failure modes are subtle and the feedback loop…
Read the field note ↗Faceted navigation generates more SEO problems per feature launch than almost anything else in e-commerce architecture. A single mid-size product catalog with 8 filter dimensions…
Read the field note ↗Google deprecated rel=next/prev in 2019 and confirmed it had never used it as a ranking signal — only as a canonicalization hint. The SEO community collectively went through the…
Read the field note ↗Google Search Console's Index Coverage report is simultaneously one of the most useful and most misread tools in technical SEO. Most practitioners treat it as a status dashboard —…
Read the field note ↗Core Web Vitals are not a checkbox exercise. They are Google's operationalized definition of page experience quality, and they feed directly into ranking signals across Search,…
Read the field note ↗Getting LCP below 2.5 seconds is the single most impactful Core Web Vitals optimization most sites can make — it directly affects the metric with the clearest correlation to both…
Read the field note ↗Get a focused SEO audit or a consultation on your next technical decision. We’ll agree on the scope and fee before any work begins.
