The SEO Blog
Notes on search
Essays and field notes on technical SEO, web performance, and the quiet mechanics of ranking. Written from audits, not opinion.
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XML sitemaps that actually help
Sitemaps will not rank your pages, but a clean, honest, well-segmented one speeds up discovery and doubles as a diagnostic tool. Here is how to build it.
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How Google actually treats your canonical tags
Google treats rel=canonical as a suggestion, not a command. When it gets ignored, how it differs from noindex and redirects, and how to audit what Google chose.
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What robots.txt controls and what it absolutely does not
robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. Learn the myths that cause real damage, the syntax gotchas, how to test changes, and how to handle AI crawlers.
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Noindex, disallow, and nofollow do different jobs
The three most confused directives in SEO control crawling, indexing, and link signals separately. What each one does and the classic ways they backfire.
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Duplicate content in the real world
Why the duplicate content penalty is a myth, where duplication really comes from, and how to consolidate signals with redirects and canonical tags.
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Content pruning and when deleting pages helps
Old, thin, and forgotten pages can weigh a site down. How to decide what to improve, merge, redirect, or remove, and what pruning realistically achieves.
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Search intent and the art of matching pages to queries
Rankings are an intent-matching contest before they are anything else. How to read what a query really wants and why the SERP itself is the answer key.
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Subdomain or subfolder and why the debate refuses to die
Google says subdomains and subfolders both work. Practitioners keep seeing consolidation wins. How to make the call for blogs, shops, and international sites.
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