Notes on growth
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…
How to Rank in AI Overviews: What Google Has Actually Published
AI Overviews cite what Google's ranking systems retrieve. Here is how grounding and query fan-out work, a table of GEO tactics against Google's published position, and what actually…
Parasite SEO: What Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy Actually Punishes
Google calls parasite SEO site reputation abuse. Here is what the policy actually targets, the dates that matter for diagnosis, a decision table for auditing a section, and…
iGaming SEO After the Spam Updates: What Still Works Across Seven Markets
The spam policies describe this vertical's playbook line by line. What I run instead across seven regulated markets, and where a smaller affiliate still wins.
Case Study: Recovering 45,000 Monthly Visits After a Google Spam Update
A sports property lost its rankings to a Google spam update. Here is the decision sequence that brought roughly 45,000 monthly organic visits back.