Technical SEO, search intelligence, and the code behind it — notes from 20+ years of making websites work harder.
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.
No, COPPA is not an Italian cured meat — it's the US regulation that went live on July 1st 2013, and even the 'intent' to collect a child's data counts. A $16,000 fine per case says pay attention.
Your site has been hacked. The instinct is to rush and open it to see what happened — which is exactly the wrong move. Three rules and a handful of tools for a calmer diagnosis.
Inspect Element shows the DOM after the browser has fixed things up — not the same as View Source. A small but costly distinction, told through a heated G+ diatribe.
A Smashing Magazine article reduced SEO to 'some technical considerations' — and it struck a nerve. A Christmas reply defending a discipline that's anything but simple.
Google is cutting off keyword-volume API access for the big SEO dashboards and panic is setting in. No need — a handful of free tools and some creativity go a long way.
The disavow tool is not a magic fix. A follow-up after too many emails from people who thought uploading a txt file was the end of their bad-link problems — it rarely is.
Bing got there first with a disavow tool; now Google has matched it. A walkthrough of why poor-quality links matter and how to approach the weeding exercise sensibly.
Horde was supposed to fix the domain-crowding problem earlier in the year; it didn't, really. Matt Cutts now says it's sorted — so let's see if the SERPs actually agree.