Posts on SEO.
41 posts tagged "SEO".
My canonical tags were deindexing my own articles. GA4 had been right all along.
GA4 showed 2 events per seven days across a site with 70+ articles. The first instinct was broken tracking. The real cause was canonical tags instructing Google to ignore the pages meant to rank — a discovery collapse that looks identical to a measurement failure until GSC gives it away.
One audit finding, eight chapters: closing content-5 with a hub instead of inline links
The SEO audit said to retrofit inline links across seventy articles. I built a guide hub instead, and the link-graph problem stopped being about retrofitting and started being about new direction.
Six pages Google couldn't find: telemetry ruled out the technical before we touched any code
The GSC digest showed six pages stuck at “URL is unknown to Google.” That specific status — not crawled and filtered, just never discovered — changed what we looked for first. Two stdlib-only telemetry skills made that diagnostic distinction available before we opened a single file.
Eight cannibalisation pairs, one prefix strip, one PR
A numeric prefix in every calculator slug had created eight cannibalisation pairs — Google couldn't determine which URL was authoritative, so neither ranked with confidence. The fix required one atomic operation across content, routing, and the internal link graph: universal prefix strip, 23 permanent redirects, every MDX cross-link repointed. Not three PRs. One.
Eight calculators were cannibalising each other. One prefix strip fixed it in 72 hours.
A site-wide SEO audit against ukcalculator.uk surfaced 8 routes competing with themselves for the same search intent. The fix — strip the NN- prefix, issue 308 redirects across 23 routes, repoint every internal cross-link — had to land as a single atomic operation or it would introduce crawl noise between deployments. Three days later, Google had started indexing.