Category
Modern entity SEO, technical indexing foundations, keyword intent research, and building durable link authority that survives core algorithm updates.
25 articles
Search intent is what the person wants to happen next, and it decides the format of your page completely. An article cannot rank where Google is returning product pages. A product page cannot rank where Google is returning tutorials. No amount of quality overrides a format mismatch. The reliable way to determine intent is not […]
A page is not indexed for one of three reasons: Google cannot reach it, Google will not store it, or Google has chosen a different URL to represent it — and Search Console tells you which, in a status most people misread. The most common status of all, "Crawled — currently not indexed," is one […]
Most reported keyword cannibalisation is not cannibalisation. Two of your pages appearing for one query is normal, common, and frequently good — Google chooses which page fits each search, and having two relevant pages is not a problem in itself. Real cannibalisation has a specific signature: two pages that answer the same question, swapping positions […]
The largest published analysis of AI citations found that reviews and third-party social proof accounted for 57% of cited sources, while blogs and guides accounted for 5.4%. That finding is genuinely useful and it is also widely misreported, because the study measured branded prompts — questions about specific companies — and the distribution for informational […]
Most keyword research starts in the wrong place: a tool, showing estimated volumes for a market you have no position in. Start instead with Search Console, which shows queries your site already appears for, how often, and roughly where. That is measured data about you rather than an estimate about a market — and no […]
A paid keyword tool gives you two things you cannot get free: search volume estimates for markets you have no presence in, and a backlink index. Everything else in keyword research is available without paying anything. And for a small site, the free sources are frequently better — because they are your own measured data […]
An entity is a specific thing a search system can identify and hold facts about — a person, a company, a product, a place — as opposed to a string of characters that happens to appear on a page. Search engines have resolved queries to entities for over a decade. What changed is that generative […]
This page does not name a winner. Both major tools are competent, their feature sets converge every year, and the differences that matter to you depend on facts about your situation rather than about the software. It also carries no prices, because they change, and no affiliate links, because the comparison is only worth reading […]
Long-tail keywords are winnable for a small site because the answer is specific, not because the volume is small. That distinction is the whole thing, and most coverage gets it backwards. "How do I fix a WordPress database connection error after migrating hosts" has a real answer, and a page that gives it exactly beats […]
Technical SEO is the work of making sure a search engine can reach, render, understand and store your pages — and almost every real failure happens in the first two of those, not in the sophisticated parts people spend their time on. The useful mental model is a stack of four layers, each of which […]
AI search has not changed what makes a page worth reading. It has changed what a ranking is worth. The same page that ranked third last year still ranks third; the difference is how many people now get their answer without ever seeing it. That difference has been measured properly. In a randomised field experiment […]
Google's own position, stated publicly by Gary Illyes at Pubcon in September 2023: "I think they are important, but I think people overestimate the importance of links. I don't agree it's in the top three. It hasn't been for some time." That sentence should have ended a whole industry of tactics, and it did not. […]