Insights

Research, analysis and field notes on search — what we measure inside Algorithm, what changes in the algorithms, and what it means for the companies we work with.

13 materials
Guide

Mobile SEO Checklist

A mobile SEO checklist is a set of checks that confirm the mobile version of a site can be crawled, rendered, indexed, and used on a phone, in that order. Since Google finished the move to mobile-first indexing, the mobile version is the one in the index, and whatever Googlebot Smartphone fetches at your URL […]

Analysis

Website Rankings Loss Audit: The Update Is a Date, Not a Diagnosis

The call usually starts the same way: “We got hit by the update.” A drop in Search Console, a date that lines up with something on the Search Status Dashboard, and a conclusion. Then the decomposition shows brand queries flat, non-brand down across one folder, and the folder’s canonical tags pointing at a staging domain […]

Guide

What to Do After Keyword Research: The Spreadsheet Isn’t the Plan

After keyword research, the next step is clustering. Group the list by which queries return the same URLs, and a few thousand rows become a few dozen intents; everything that follows works on those intents, not on the raw export. The last market entry I sized came in at 1,400 rows. Clustered, it was 30 […]

Analysis

301 Redirect SEO Penalty: The Redirect Isn’t Punished. It’s Ignored.

A site gets “pushed” through a redirect pipe: a few thousand forum and web 2.0 links aimed at a layer of throwaway domains, each of those 301’d into the money site. Three months later nothing has happened. No drop, no manual action in Search Console, no warning of any kind. And no growth. The owner […]

Guide

Technical SEO Audit: Reading the List, Not Generating It

Any tool generates the 170-issue list. The audit is reading it — which failures on the path from discovery to retrieval actually bind.

Guide

International SEO Audit: Where the Top-Ranking Guides Stop

What an international audit actually checks — and where the top-ranking guides stop.

Guide

B2B SEO Audit: Why Your Traffic Isn’t Reaching the Pipeline

Rankings up, pipeline flat. The audit that finds why good traffic never becomes deals.

Guide

Ecommerce SEO Audit: How to Triage a Store’s URLs

Millions of URLs, and almost none should rank. An audit as triage across a system, not a page inspection.

Guide

Enterprise SEO Audit: The Template Is the Unit, Not the Page

At enterprise scale you audit the template, not the page — one fix ships across thousands of URLs.