Know before Google does
Writeups of the disasters SEO-critical signals can cause, and the mechanics of catching them early.
Your CDN can serve Googlebot a different page than your visitors
A site looks perfect in a browser and is broken for crawlers when something between the origin and the crawler changes the response. The mechanisms, and how to check for a split between what Googlebot gets and what a visitor gets.
How AI crawlers actually see your site
What GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot are each for, what they obey, and what blocking one costs you.
llms.txt: what it is and whether it actually does anything
llms.txt is a proposed markdown file that lists a site's main content for large language models. What it can and cannot do, who actually reads it, and what demonstrably does affect whether an assistant uses your page.
A staging site got indexed by Google. How to get it out, and how to stop it happening again.
Your staging host is in the search results, possibly duplicating production. Why it happened, the order that gets it out, what the Removals tool actually does, and the fix that stops it for good.
Canonical mistakes that quietly kill rankings
A canonical tag is a page telling Google which URL is the preferred one. The common mistakes point it at a redirect, a noindexed page, a 404, or another host. What each one does and how to check the tag.
Google Search Console won't warn you in time
Search Console is a reporting surface, not an alert. Its data arrives after Google has crawled and processed, so it cannot warn you the day a page changes. What it is genuinely for, and what to pair it with.
Redirect chains: how many hops is too many?
A redirect chain is a series of redirects where each one sends the visitor to the next instead of the final page. What each hop costs, when crawlers give up, and how to flatten the chain to one direct redirect.
Site migration SEO monitoring: the launch-day and 90-day playbook
A migration is a checklist of specific things that break, and most are known before launch. How to order the launch-day checks and what to verify through the first 90 days.
SSL and domain expiry: the boring disasters
A lapsed SSL certificate or domain registration takes the whole site out of business, not the rankings. How each one fails, why neither shows in the traffic until it is too late, and what to watch.
Accidentally noindexed your site? Find and fix it fast
How to confirm an accidental noindex in the live HTML and the response headers, find what put it on, fix it, and get the page back in the index without waiting on Search Console.
Why did my organic traffic drop overnight? A triage checklist
Organic traffic dropped overnight. Work the list: indexability, robots.txt, canonicals, status codes, sitemap, a search update, or a tracking break. How to check each in under a minute and what the result means.
X-Robots-Tag vs meta robots: the noindex you cannot see in the HTML
X-Robots-Tag and meta robots both send noindex, but one lives in the response headers and one lives in the HTML. What each one does, which wins when both are present, and how to check both.
Robots.txt changes that silently deindex whole sections
One Disallow line can remove a section from Google for days. How Googlebot actually resolves robots.txt, why the file's text is the wrong thing to watch, and what to check after every deploy.
What is noindex, and why it silently kills traffic
noindex tells Google not to index a page. Here is how it works, why a stray noindex routinely sits live for 24 to 72 hours before anyone notices, and how to find and fix it before rankings slide.