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Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.

All 125 SEO & GEO 89 Digital Marketing 16 Tips 12 AI & LLM 6 Nix 2
Latest post

Still staring at an XML sitemap error you can't explain?

▸TL;DR
  • A sitemap that renders as a plain list of URLs isn't necessarily broken — a valid multilingual one looks exactly like that in every browser. Whether Google rejects it comes down to the Content-Type, not the rendering.
  • Work the checks in order — first bytes and BOM, Content-Type, status code, XML validity, then the bot's-eye view — and the first one that misbehaves is your answer.
SEO & GEO·5 Jul 2026·9 min read
Table of contents
  • Why what the browser shows proves nothing
  • 1. Check the first bytes for a BOM or leading junk
  • 2. Confirm the Content-Type
  • 3. Confirm the URL actually returns 200
  • 4. Validate the whole file as XML
  • 5. Check what Googlebot sees, not what your browser sees
  • 6. Make sure every <loc> matches your verified property
  • 7. Check your lastmod dates are valid
  • If every check passes
  • The one-line version
SEO & GEO1 May 2026

The cost of falling in love with technology

Cypher is expressive, graphs fit SEO data, embedded options exist. None of it survived the question 'what happens when the user opens DevTools?'

5 min read
SEO & GEO22 Apr 2026

Shadow DOM — the panic room inside your web page

The Shadow DOM is a secret room inside your web page — with its own CSS, its own events, and the quiet ability to vanish from your SEO audits and every AI crawler that ever visits.

5 min read
SEO & GEO10 Apr 2020

Enhance Screaming Frog's 404 errors report

Screaming Frog's 404 export is useful, but it's missing a summary and a way to subset. A small Python notebook with Pandas picks up the slack — and turns the report into something your content team will actually read.

5 min read
SEO & GEO23 Mar 2017

Should I use Angular.Js for my site? Would it harm my SEO?

Out of roughly 370 million sites, fewer than half a percent use Angular — and there's a reason. A grumpy look at why SPAs and SEO still argue, plus two acronyms (KISS and YAGNI) that deserve a reminder.

4 min read
SEO & GEO29 Jul 2015

Closely follow Google Panda doesn't make sense

Panda used to land overnight; 4.2 will drip out over months. Fairer for site owners hit by false positives — and the end of the rank-tracker theatre that correlated every wobble to a named update.

1 min read