Blog
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Most of your product pages cannot rank
Most product pages cannot rank, and telling a client that is more useful than another list of on-page recommendations. Not because the pages are badly built. Because there are three thousand of them, they are competing against Amazon and the manufacturer, and the effort available is enough to properly do about twenty. The question worth…
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Click depth is a symptom, not a rule
Click depth is how many clicks it takes to get from the home page to a given page. The received wisdom is that everything should be within three, and like most received wisdom it is roughly right and badly explained. Three is not a rule. What is actually true is narrower: depth is a symptom,…
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Internal linking when the catalogue is too big to do by hand
The advice in most internal linking posts is: open the page, find a relevant phrase, link it to the page you want to rank. That works, and I recommend it, and it does not survive contact with a catalogue of nine thousand products. Nobody is hand-placing links on nine thousand pages. So the question on…
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Faceted navigation: index, crawl or block, per facet
Faceted navigation is the single largest generator of URLs on most ecommerce sites, and the decision about it is almost never made. It is inherited from the theme and then discovered two years later in a crawl. The maths is the problem. Six filters with five options each is not eleven pages. It is every…
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Log files tell you what Googlebot actually did
Every crawler tells you what is on your site. Log files tell you what Googlebot actually did about it, and those are not the same document. This is the one technical check I rate highly and recommend rarely, because for most sites the effort is not worth it. I want to be straight about that…
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9,220 pages indexed. Nobody decided to publish them.
A site with 9,220 pages indexed and roughly 8,000 visits a month. Another with 1,630 indexed and a catalogue of a few hundred real products. A third with 1,265 indexable pages, of which 1,082 were blog posts. None of those businesses set out to publish that much. In every case the platform did it, one…
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An SEO audit is not a crawl report
If what you were handed is a list of issues sorted by severity, with a count next to each, you were handed a crawl report. It may have cost you two thousand pounds and it may have a cover page with your logo on it. It is still a crawl report. I am not being…
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How to read a crawl without drowning in it
The first time you export a crawl of a real site you get a spreadsheet with forty columns and several thousand rows, and the honest reaction is to close it. I have been doing this for fifteen years and I still read almost none of it. Here is the order I actually go in, which…
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If you only do three things, which three?
Every audit I hand over has more in it than the client will ever do. That is not a flaw in the audit. It is what an audit is, a complete picture, and the complete picture has always been bigger than one quarter’s capacity. So the useful question is not what is wrong. It is:…
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Deindexed pages: find out what shipped that week
A page that was in Google and is now not is a different problem from a page that was never accepted, and the two get treated as one thing constantly. If the page was never indexed, you are asking whether it is good enough, which is the crawled, currently not indexed conversation and it is…