Notes on growth
Alternate Page With Proper Canonical Tag: When Google’s “Nothing to Do” Is True, and the Three Checks That Say Otherwise
Alternate page with proper canonical tag means your canonical is working and Google agrees. That is true for each URL. Three yes or no checks, combined into an…
Crawled – Currently Not Indexed: Google Read the Page and Passed. Here Is How to Find the Template Causing It
Crawled, currently not indexed means Google fetched the page and declined it for now. Resubmitting does nothing. A per-template rate table shows where the problem actually lives, and…
X-Robots-Tag: The Header That Controls the 85 Percent of a Site a Robots Meta Tag Cannot Reach
Every rule the robots meta tag carries can be sent as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and the header works on files where a meta tag is impossible. Here…
SEO Content Audit: The Five Decisions Google Documents, and the Arithmetic That Says Where to Spend the Hours
An SEO content audit has five possible outcomes per URL and Google documents what each one does. Here are those quotes, a table of what each decision actually…
International SEO: The URL Structure Decision, and the hreflang Arithmetic Behind It
International SEO comes down to two decisions: where the localised versions live, and whether the annotations linking them are reciprocal. Here is what Google documents about each URL…
JavaScript SEO: The Three Phases Googlebot Uses, and the Discovery Cost of Rendering Your Links
Google processes JavaScript in three separate phases, and the gap between crawling and rendering is where most JavaScript SEO problems live. Here is what the documentation actually says,…
Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical: How to Triage the Report Without Fixing the Wrong URLs
What "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" means in Google's own words, why most of it is working as intended, and a sampling method that finds the share of the…
Discovered, Currently Not Indexed: Capacity Problem or Demand Problem, and How to Tell
Discovered, currently not indexed means Google knows a URL and has not fetched it yet. A backlog model shows when it is a crawl capacity problem and when…
Index Bloat: What It Costs in Recrawl Days, and the Control That Actually Fixes It
Index bloat measured in recrawl days rather than adjectives, with the four controls ranked by what each one actually stops, straight from Google's documentation.
Site Architecture for SEO: The Depth Arithmetic That Decides What Gets Crawled
Site architecture is the link graph, not the folder names. What Google actually documents about crawlable links and URL structure, plus a click-depth table that tells you how…