Notes on growth
E-E-A-T in SEO: Google Says It Is Not a Ranking Factor, and It Still Decides Your Recovery
Google states plainly that E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor. Here is what its documentation actually asks for, letter by letter, the Who, How and Why test…
How to Get Cited by ChatGPT: The Four OpenAI Crawlers That Decide It
Whether ChatGPT can cite you is decided in your robots.txt, not your content. Here is what each of OpenAI's four documented crawlers does, the one line that quietly…
The SEO Migration Checklist: The Sequence That Stops a Replatform Losing Traffic
A botched migration is one of the most common causes of a traffic collapse that gets misdiagnosed as a penalty. Here is the full sequence, what Google actually…
Is AI Content Bad for SEO? The Policy Says Nothing About Who Wrote It
Google has never banned AI-generated content. What it bans is scaled content abuse, and the policy is written around purpose and value rather than authorship. Here is where…
Answer Engine Optimization: A Useful Label for Work That Is Still SEO
AEO is the practice of getting your content used in a generated answer rather than a list of links. Google's position is that this is still SEO. Here…
Google Penalty Removal: The Reconsideration Request That Actually Gets Accepted
Diagnosis is one job and removal is another. This is the removal procedure: what a reconsideration request has to prove, the four reasons they get rejected, and what…
Thin Content: There Is No Word Count, and There Is No Thin Content Penalty
Google has no spam policy called thin content, and no length threshold anywhere in its documentation. Here is what the named policies actually say, the test that replaces…
Crawl Budget: Who Actually Has a Problem, and the Index Bloat Behind It
Google says most sites should not think about crawl budget at all. Here is the arithmetic that tells you whether yours is one of the exceptions, and why…
The SEO Audit Checklist I Actually Use: 41 Checks, Ordered by What Moves Traffic
Most SEO audit checklists are inventories that treat every finding as equal. This is the 41-check sequence I run on a paid audit, ordered so the checks that…
Cloaking in SEO: What Counts, What Does Not, and How Google Catches It
Cloaking is showing search engines different content from users in order to manipulate rankings. Here is Google's actual definition, the variants that are not cloaking at all, and…