Notes on growth
SEO Split Testing: What Google’s Rules Allow, and the Sample Size That Decides Whether Your Test Proves Anything
Google has documented how to run A/B and multivariate tests without breaking its own rules, down to which redirect code to use. The harder problem is statistical: most…
Orphan Pages: Why Google Never Finds Them, and the Audit That Surfaces Yours
An orphan page is a URL nothing on your site links to. Google's documentation is explicit about how it discovers URLs, and a sitemap entry is not the…
Faceted Navigation SEO: The 4.5 Million URL Problem, and Which Control Actually Stops It
Five filters on forty categories can generate four and a half million URLs, and Googlebot has to crawl them before it can know they are worthless. Here is…
Pagination SEO: What Google Actually Crawls, and the 167-Page Example That Breaks Most Category Pages
Google dropped rel=next and rel=prev years ago and most pagination advice never caught up. Here is what the current documentation says, the four patterns ranked by what Google…
301 vs 302 Redirect: Which One Google Canonicalizes, and What the Wrong Choice Costs
A permanent redirect tells Google to index the destination. A temporary one tells Google to keep indexing the source. Here is the documented difference across all five redirect…
Robots.txt for SEO: What It Controls, What It Cannot, and How Google Reads Yours
Most robots.txt problems come from using it for a job it does not do. Here is Google's own documentation on what a Disallow rule actually achieves, the response-code…
Schema Markup for AI Search: What Google Actually Says You Need
Google's documentation states there is no special schema.org markup needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Here is what the docs actually say, what schema still…
Canonical Tag SEO: Why Google Ignores Yours, and What to Do About It
A rel=canonical is a hint, not a rule, and Google says so in its own documentation. Here is the signal hierarchy that decides which URL actually gets indexed,…
Server Log File Analysis for SEO: The Only Record of What Googlebot Actually Did
Search Console tells you what Google concluded. Server logs tell you what Google did. Here is how to verify a request really came from Googlebot, the commands that…
Soft 404s: What Google Actually Means, and the Correct Fix for Each Cause
A soft 404 is a page that tells a human it is missing while telling Google it is fine. Here is Google's own definition, the six things that…