A CMS migration is one of the few projects where the technical work can go perfectly and the outcome still be a disaster. The site launches on time, looks better, loads faster, and traffic falls by half, because a few hundred URLs changed shape and nobody built the map. The traffic loss is not caused by the new...
Website Optimization
Guides, tips, and best practices for website optimization — improving performance, speed, and user experience, with practical notes.
Multilingual SEO is usually presented as a translation problem with some technical markup attached. Running this site in twelve languages, English, Arabic, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Vietnamese and both written forms of Chinese, has made it clear that the translation is the easy...
A content refresh is the highest-return work available on most established sites, and it is unpopular because it produces nothing to announce. Updating a post that already ranks feels like maintenance. Publishing a new one feels like progress. The numbers usually disagree. The reason is that an existing page has...
Programmatic SEO means generating many pages from a template and a dataset, one per city, per product pair, per parameter combination. Done with a real dataset it is one of the most efficient things in the discipline. Done with a thesaurus and a spinner it is the thing search engines have spent two decades learning to...
Content pruning is the least intuitive thing in search optimisation, because every instinct says more pages should mean more traffic. Publishing feels like accumulation. Deleting feels like throwing away work somebody paid for. The mechanism that makes removal helpful is competition between your own pages. When two of...
Database performance work usually begins with someone proposing a bigger instance, and it usually ends with the discovery that one query was doing a sequential scan over four million rows on every page load. The hardware was never the constraint. The plan was. That pattern is consistent enough to be worth stating as a...
Entity SEO starts from a fact that most optimisation advice still ignores: search engines stopped matching strings a long time ago. They match things. A page is not scored on whether it contains a phrase, it is scored on whether the system believes the page is about the concept behind the phrase, and on how confident...
Ranked but not cited is the specific frustration of doing search engine optimisation correctly and watching it produce nothing. The rankings arrive. The impressions climb. The clicks do not follow, and no amount of rewriting the title tag changes it. That is not a failure of your optimisation. It is what happens when...
The honest answer to whether llms.txt does anything yet is: almost nothing, measurably, and the people telling you it is essential for AI visibility are selling something. That is an uncomfortable position to hold while also recommending you publish one, so this post shows the numbers and then explains the...
GEO for ecommerce is a narrower problem than GEO for content, and easier in one specific way: an assistant answering a product question wants facts it can state without hedging. Price, availability, dimensions, compatibility, return window. Those either exist in a machine-readable form on your site or they do not, and...