SEO field notes · newest first
If bounce or engagement numbers look alarming and they are driving content decisions, check the measurement before the content. Client-side analytics records only the visits where its tags loaded and...
If content that appears as visitors scroll is missing from Google's index, look at what triggers it. Google's guide to lazy-loaded content states the constraint plainly: Google Search does not...
"Neighborhood penalty" isn't a term in Google's current guidance. It doesn't appear in Google's spam policies, its help for the Manual actions report or its guidance on disavowing links. What...
Inline CSS doesn't make two articles identical in Google's eyes. Google's canonicalization documentation says that when it finds multiple pages that seem to be the same, or whose primary content...
When review aggregators outrank your own pricing page for "[your product] pricing," the query can be asking more than your page answers. Someone searching it may want to know what...
If Google Images shows a small, soft version of an image your page serves sharply on desktop, check the src attribute before blaming srcset. Google's image SEO best practices say...
A sitewide mega menu and a bloated footer put the same large set of links on every page of your site, so your top categories share every page's navigation with...
A high Domain Authority alongside falling traffic isn't a paradox; it's a clue. Domain Authority is a third-party score, and Moz, which developed it, says it is not a Google...
A confirmation page can start ranking for a commercial term when three things line up: the page is indexable, it contains the product or service name, and links point to...
If a site: search on your domain turns up feed URLs, your feeds have become indexable documents in their own right. Google's list of file types indexable by Google includes...
Rankings that bring traffic but no revenue can be an intent problem before they are a traffic problem. The informational-versus-transactional split that keyword tools hand you flattens a finer progression;...
When a translated page outranks the original-language version, hreflang is the obvious suspect. Start somewhere else. Google describes hreflang as a way to help Google Search point users to the...
Dynamic rendering serves crawlers a prerendered HTML snapshot while visitors get the live, client-rendered page. When the snapshot cache lags behind your data, Googlebot receives yesterday's price and availability while...
A third-party widget, whether live chat, a social embed, a review badge or a support tool, loads its own markup into your pages, and that markup can include links to...
When a contact page shows up for the service searches you care about, two things can stack: it is linked from every page on the site, and it contains the...
Links you earned years ago can end up pointing at pages that no longer exist. A migration drops old paths, a content cleanup deletes the one post other sites cited,...
If your rich results vanished and the only recent change was a theme update, start with the theme. If it was emitting your structured data, an update that refactored its...
When a Wix redesign changes your page URLs, Google sees it the way it sees any URL change: the old addresses and the new ones are different URLs, and the...
A quarterly business review can help keep SEO funded and aligned with the business when it reports outcomes instead of activity. An executive deciding budget is weighing whether revenue, pipeline...
A team that ships several times a day can ship an SEO regression without noticing: a template that drops the canonical, a noindex that escapes staging, a robots.txt rule that...
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It comes from Google's search quality rater guidelines, and it is not a score you can raise. Google's guide to creating helpful,...
Negative SEO is any attempt to hurt a site's search performance from the outside: floods of spammy backlinks, scraped copies of its content, fake reviews, fake requests to remove its...
"Slow for Googlebot" can mean two different things, and neither is what your browser shows you. One is how quickly your server answers Googlebot's own requests, which Search Console's Crawl...
Contractor outcomes can be decided before the work begins. A statement of work with explicit exclusions and observable acceptance criteria, paired with a tiered quality gate, does much to settle...
Original research can be defensible because the asset is data your competitors can't easily reproduce. An explanation of a concept can be rewritten by anyone who reads the same sources....