Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
llms.txt is not a ranking signal and the agents it was built for don't fetch it. Yet Google added it to Lighthouse under Discoverability. The file's only real shot at mattering is as a map handed to browser agents — next to WebMCP, not in search.
Cypher is expressive, graphs fit SEO data, embedded options exist. None of it survived the question 'what happens when the user opens DevTools?'
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.
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.
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.
Before everyone had a real-time monitoring SaaS, there was curl with -w. A small script I used to spot-check page load times across a list of URLs — and what it taught me about trusting tools I didn't write myself.
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.
Six months trying to growth-hack a B2B2C product taught me two uncomfortable things: without control of the end user, scale is a fairy tale — and growth is an attitude, not a playbook.
Soft 404s, misconfigured Expires headers, hidden redirect chains — when a large corporate site misbehaves in search, the answer is almost always in the HTTP headers. Three checkers I actually use, and one I don't.