Notes on growth
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…
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…