Notes on growth
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…
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…