Notes on growth
Mobile-First Indexing: What Google Actually Reads, and the Menu That Hides 75 Percent of Your Links
Mobile-first indexing means Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of your page. Here is Google's own wording, a nine-row parity table to audit against, and a model…
Content Decay: How to Tell a Decaying Page From a Seasonal One, and the Arithmetic of Waiting
Content decay is a slow loss of clicks on a page that used to perform, but most traffic labelled decay is seasonality, falling demand or a changed results…
Crawl Errors: What Google Does With Each Response Code, and the One It Calls “Possibly Good”
Google groups crawl responses as good, possibly good and bad, and 404 sits in the middle. Here is what the documentation says Googlebot does with each status code,…
Page Experience: Google Says There Is No Single Signal, and the 75th Percentile Is Why That Matters
Google's documentation states plainly that there is no single page experience signal, and lists six questions instead. Here are those questions in Google's words, the current Core Web…
Internal Linking for SEO: What Google Documents, and a 106-Page Model of Where Link Equity Goes
Internal linking for SEO is about where links start, not how many you add. Google's own guidance in its words, a 106-page PageRank model showing one homepage link…
llms.txt: What the File Actually Does, Who Reads It, and What It Weighs on a Real Site
llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file that gives AI agents a curated map of your best pages. Google says it will neither harm nor help you in Search.…
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…