Practical thinking on technical SEO, content, and the changing shape of search. From the details that break a crawl to the decisions that build a business.
270 field notes · Page 14 of 23
A working SEO's honest account of how SpamBrain's generative-content detection refresh changed enforcement in 2025–2026, what the signals actually look like, and where the received…
Read the field note ↗Two years after Google's site reputation abuse policy launched, what actually happened to the coupon subfolders, the white-label review sections, and the parasite-SEO plays that…
Read the field note ↗Published 19 May 2026. This is a case-based account. The client has reviewed and approved this writeup. Details that would identify the site are changed; the technical pattern is…
Read the field note ↗The May 2024 leak of Google's internal API documentation is background noise now. Not ancient history — background noise. The kind of thing you reference in a client kickoff call…
Read the field note ↗After rebuilding IA for a 780k-SKU catalog in late 2025, I developed the CLR model — Category, Lens, Resolution — that survives AI Overview snippet extraction and reduced crawl budgets.
Read the field note ↗The Section/Topic/Tag model that structured media sites for a decade is now producing crawl dilution and AI Overview losses. Here's what I've replaced it with and why.
Read the field note ↗Running card-sort studies for taxonomy design when AI Overviews have rewritten what 'findable' means. My CREST framework, three mistakes I made in 2025, and why most UX-first…
Read the field note ↗Breadcrumb markup in 2026 is doing more work than most SEOs realize — entity-graph signaling, AI Overview path assertions, crawl hierarchy communication. Here's the full audit…
Read the field note ↗Reddit flooded SERPs through mid-2025, then Google adjusted. Here's exactly how niche UGC sites are reclaiming territory from TripAdvisor right now — and what I'd do differently if…
Read the field note ↗I manage three forum properties on three different platforms. phpBB consistently outranks the others. Two years of investigation into why — including the Discourse config changes…
Read the field note ↗An 18-month case study in taking organic traffic from Fandom's wiki network — what worked, what Google adjusted, and the 14% that reversed. Exact numbers, specific pages, no vague…
Read the field note ↗I pulled data from 2.4 million Disqus comment threads across 14 publishing sites I have access to. What the engagement patterns show about how Google treats comment sections in 2026…
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.
