Topic · 37 articles
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, rendering, redirects, canonicals and speed. The checks behind the product, explained one at a time, with what to do when one fails.
All Technical SEO articles
· 10 min read
Why Your Website Is Not Showing Up on Google (and How to Fix It)
If your website is not showing up on Google, one of six causes is almost always to blame. This guide walks them in order of likelihood, with the exact check for each.
· 10 min read
How to Check If a Page Is Indexed by Google (4 Reliable Ways)
A page can be published, live, and still invisible to Google. Here are four reliable ways to check if a page is indexed, and the difference between indexed, ranking, and merely discoverable.
· 10 min read
Soft 404 Errors: What They Are and How to Fix Them
A soft 404 is a page that tells your visitor "not found" while telling Google "200 OK." Here is what causes the mismatch, how to find every soft 404 on your site, and the correct fix for each cause.
· 11 min read
How to Find and Fix Broken Internal Links
A link to a 404 wastes crawl budget, strands readers and severs a discovery path. This is how to find broken internal links, separate real ones from false positives, and fix each correctly.
· 14 min read
Internal Link Checker Tools: What Each One Can Actually See
Internal link checkers come in three scopes: one page, one crawl, or the whole graph, and they are not substitutes for each other. Eight tools compared on what each can actually read, with every limit taken from the vendor's own page.
· 9 min read
Screaming Frog Alternatives: What Each One Actually Crawls for Free
Screaming Frog's free version caps at 500 URLs, and its own pricing table crosses another 24 rows for that tier, including JavaScript rendering and crawl configuration. Here is what each free alternative actually reads, and what each one gives up.
· 12 min read
Bing SEO: What Is Actually Different, and Whether It Is Worth Your Time
Bing has its own crawler, its own webmaster product, and support for a content-submission protocol called IndexNow. Here is what that changes about your work, how the setup goes step by step, and when skipping it is the right call.
· 13 min read
URL Structure for SEO: What Google Documents and What It Does Not
Google's URL structure documentation sets out three hard requirements and seven best practices, and makes no ranking claim anywhere on it. This works through what that page states word for word, which common URL rules it does not support, and when an existing URL is worth a redirect.
· 15 min read
Crawled - Currently Not Indexed: How to Tell a Real Problem From a Normal One
"Crawled - currently not indexed" is the Search Console status that generates the most panic per affected URL and the least understanding. This guide separates the cases that need a fix from the ones that need patience, and gives the fix order for everything in between.
· 14 min read
Orphan Pages: How to Find and Fix Them
An orphan page is one no other page on your site links to, which usually means Google crawls it rarely and ranks it badly. Finding yours takes four data sources rather than one, and the right answer differs from one orphan to the next.
· 14 min read
Noindex: How to Keep a Page Out of Google, and the Ways It Silently Fails
A noindex that Google never crawls is not a noindex. This is what the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag header each actually do, what happens when two of the twelve robots rules collide on one page, and how to tell whether a removal has landed.
· 15 min read
Anchor Text: What You Control, What You Request, and What You Leave Alone
Sorting anchors by what they look like tells you nothing about what you are allowed to do with a particular link. Sorting them by who writes the anchor answers the question people actually arrive with, and it changes which of Google's rules apply.
· 18 min read
Crawl Budget: How Google Decides What to Crawl
Google refreshed its crawl budget documentation in July 2026, and the two most-read third-party guides still describe the version it replaced. This covers how crawl capacity and crawl demand work, the three signs the problem is yours, and why noindex costs you a crawl rather than saving one.
· 16 min read
Faceted Navigation SEO: Which Filter URLs to Block, and Which to Keep
Ask three ranking guides what to do with your filter URLs and two will tell you to canonicalize them. Google's own documentation, updated at the end of 2025, recommends blocking them in robots.txt and calls canonical tags less effective in the long term.
· 10 min read
External Links and SEO: When to Link Out, and When to Nofollow
Most advice about links is advice about getting them. The other half of the job is what your own pages point at, which attribute each of those links needs, and the fact that a good outbound link quietly stops being one about two years after you publish it.
· 16 min read
301 vs 302 Redirects: What Google Actually Says
Almost every guide to 301 versus 302 redirects tells you the temporary one loses your link equity. Google's own documentation says something narrower and more useful, and it changes when a 302 is the right answer rather than a mistake.
· 16 min read
Pagination and SEO: How to Handle Paginated URLs
Most pagination advice assumes you are running an ecommerce category page. If you are running a blog archive, a docs site or a changelog, the right answer is different, and canonicalizing page 2 to page 1 is quietly costing you indexed pages.
· 17 min read
Log File Analysis for SEO: What Server Logs Reveal About Googlebot
Search Console tells you what Google reports about your site. Your server logs tell you what Googlebot actually did, including the requests Google never mentions. Here is the workflow, the free version of it, and an honest test for whether your site is big enough to need it.
· 11 min read
Best CMS for SEO: How to Choose a Platform That Ranks
The best CMS for SEO depends on your team, your content velocity, and your growth plans, not on a vendor's ranking. Here is a neutral way to compare WordPress, Webflow, headless, and Next.js and pick the one you can actually run.
· 12 min read
Headless CMS SEO: A Guide to Rendering and Ranking
Going headless splits content from presentation, and done carelessly it splits your SEO too. This guide covers the rendering decision, who owns each SEO element, and how to migrate without losing rankings.
· 13 min read
Website Redesign SEO: How to Redesign Without Losing Rankings
A redesign changes how your site looks; done carelessly it also changes how it ranks. This guide covers what actually breaks rankings in a redesign, a page-by-page parity checklist, and the staging QA step most teams skip.
· 13 min read
Mobile SEO: How to Optimize for Mobile-First Indexing
Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking, which makes the mobile version your real site. This guide covers content parity, responsive design versus separate mobile URLs, Core Web Vitals on real devices, and how to test what Google actually sees.
· 12 min read
Canonical Tags: How to Fix Duplicate Content in SEO
A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the master copy when the same content lives at several addresses. This guide covers how canonicalization works, where duplicates come from, and how to implement rel=canonical without sending Google mixed signals.
· 11 min read
Image SEO: How to Optimize Images for Search
Image SEO has two jobs: help your images rank in image search, and keep them from dragging down the page they sit on. This guide covers alt text, filenames, modern formats, responsive images, lazy loading, Core Web Vitals, sitemaps, and structured data.
· 9 min read
XML Sitemaps: How to Build and Optimize Them for SEO
An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to find, and a clean one can speed up discovery on large or poorly linked sites. But it aids discovery; it does not guarantee indexing. Here is how to build, clean, submit, and maintain one properly.
· 13 min read
Robots.txt: A Practical Guide to Controlling Crawling
Robots.txt is the small text file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they may fetch, and misreading it causes more accidental SEO damage than almost any other technical setting. This guide covers the directives, how matching works, the trap that keeps blocked pages in search, and how to test your file.
· 13 min read
International SEO: Hreflang and Multi-Region Strategy
Reaching more than one country or language means telling search engines which version of a page belongs to which audience. This guide covers URL structure, hreflang without the usual mistakes, real localization, and how duplicate content and migrations fit in.
· 13 min read
Site Migration SEO: A Checklist to Protect Your Rankings
A site migration is any change that alters your URLs, platform, or structure, and each one risks the rankings you have built. This guide gives you a phased checklist, before, during, and after launch, with the redirect map at its heart.
· 11 min read
JavaScript SEO: How to Make JS Sites Crawlable and Indexable
JavaScript builds most of the modern web, and search engines read that content in a later step than the first crawl. This guide explains how Googlebot renders JavaScript, why the delay causes indexing gaps, and how to confirm what Google actually sees.
· 13 min read
Next.js SEO: Building Search-Friendly React Applications
Client-only React apps ship an empty shell that crawlers struggle to read. Next.js fixes that by rendering real HTML on the server. This guide covers the rendering strategies and their SEO trade-offs, metadata, images, routing, sitemaps, structured data, and where Next.js is the wrong call.
· 10 min read
Technical SEO Services: What They Include and When You Need Them
Technical SEO services fix the mechanical reasons good content fails to rank. Here is what they include, the signals that mean you need them, how to choose a provider, and the situations where hiring would be money in the wrong place.
· 12 min read
Core Web Vitals: A Guide to Website Performance for SEO
Core Web Vitals measure how a page loads, responds, and stays stable, and they act as a tiebreaker in search rather than a magic lever. This guide breaks down LCP, INP, and CLS, what hurts each one, how to measure with field and lab data, and where a framework like Next.js helps.
· 13 min read
Schema Markup: A Guide to Structured Data for SEO
Schema markup is the vocabulary that describes your page to a machine, so search engines and AI answer engines can read it precisely. This guide covers what it is, the JSON-LD format Google recommends, the types that matter, and how to validate them without breaking anything.
· 14 min read
Internal Linking: A Strategy Guide for SEO
Internal linking is the most controllable ranking lever most sites underuse. This guide covers how link equity flows, how to wire a hub-and-spoke model, and how to find and fix the orphan pages search engines quietly ignore.
· 14 min read
Technical SEO Checklist: Actionable Checks for Better Rankings
A technical SEO checklist is only useful if it tells you what to fix first. This guide groups more than a hundred checks into ten areas, explains why each matters, and shows you how to run the audit and skip the issues that never touch your rankings.
· 13 min read
How Google Search Works: Crawling, Indexing and Ranking
Google Search runs in three separate stages: crawling, indexing, and ranking, and confusing them is why most "why won't my page rank" problems go unsolved. This guide explains how each stage works and gives you a diagnostic list to find the exact stage a page is stuck at.
· 15 min read
Technical SEO: Crawlability, Indexing and Site Health
Technical SEO is the plumbing that lets search engines crawl, render, index and trust your pages. This guide walks through every layer, from robots.txt to Core Web Vitals, and gives you a decision rule for when to index, noindex or canonicalize.
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