https://writemyseo.com/blog/ Daily notes on SEO data and SEO technology from WriteMySEO. en-us Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:10:00 +0000 https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-sitemaps-actually-do.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-sitemaps-actually-do.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 A sitemap is a discovery aid, not an indexing request. Knowing the difference explains why submitting one rarely fixes the problem people submit it for. sitemaps indexing crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/site-migrations-redirect-mapping.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/site-migrations-redirect-mapping.html Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Most traffic lost in a migration is lost in the URL mapping, not the redesign. The mapping is tedious, unglamorous, and the only part that reliably determines the outcome. migrations redirects technical SEO https://writemyseo.com/blog/seo-data-stack-bigquery.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/seo-data-stack-bigquery.html Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search Console keeps 16 months and caps exports at 1,000 rows. A warehouse removes both limits and makes the analyses that matter possible for the first time. BigQuery GSC API data stack https://writemyseo.com/blog/hreflang-at-scale.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/hreflang-at-scale.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 hreflang is the most error-prone tag in technical SEO because it requires bidirectional agreement across every URL in the set. Here is the failure taxonomy. hreflang international SEO technical SEO https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-ai-referral-traffic.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-ai-referral-traffic.html Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini arrives as ordinary referrals and lands in the wrong buckets by default. Here is how to isolate it and what the number does not tell you. GA4 AI search analytics https://writemyseo.com/blog/chunking-for-retrieval.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/chunking-for-retrieval.html Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Retrieval systems split your page into passages before they ever evaluate it. Structuring content around that boundary is the highest-leverage change available for AI visibility. RAG chunking AI search https://writemyseo.com/blog/canonical-tags-misunderstood.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/canonical-tags-misunderstood.html Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Google treats rel=canonical as one signal among several when picking which URL to index. Understanding what overrides it explains most canonical problems. canonical duplicate content indexing https://writemyseo.com/blog/reading-ranking-correlation-studies.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/reading-ranking-correlation-studies.html Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Annual "ranking factor" studies correlate site attributes with positions. The correlations are real. Almost every causal conclusion drawn from them is not. correlation research methods ranking factors https://writemyseo.com/blog/faceted-navigation-parameters.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/faceted-navigation-parameters.html Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Filters multiply URLs combinatorially. The fix is deciding which combinations deserve to be pages, then making the rest structurally invisible to crawlers. faceted navigation crawl budget e-commerce SEO https://writemyseo.com/blog/statistical-significance-seo.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/statistical-significance-seo.html Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 SEO data violates most assumptions behind standard significance tests. Here is what still works, what does not, and how to talk about uncertainty honestly. statistics testing measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/robots-txt-ai-crawlers.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/robots-txt-ai-crawlers.html Thu, 23 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest do different jobs. Blocking them is a business decision with asymmetric consequences. robots.txt AI crawlers crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/seo-split-testing-title-tags.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/seo-split-testing-title-tags.html Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 You cannot A/B test SEO the way you test a landing page. The workable method is a time-based test across matched page groups, and it demands more discipline than most teams apply. testing experimentation title tags https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-content-decay.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-content-decay.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Most content peaks and declines on a predictable curve. Detecting the decline early turns a rewrite into a refresh, which is an order of magnitude cheaper. content decay refresh analytics https://writemyseo.com/blog/entity-seo-knowledge-graph.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/entity-seo-knowledge-graph.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search engines model the world as entities and relationships, not just documents and keywords. Becoming a recognized entity is a specific, achievable technical exercise. entities Knowledge Graph structured data https://writemyseo.com/blog/indexnow-does-it-help.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/indexnow-does-it-help.html Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 A push protocol for telling search engines a URL changed. Supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam — and notably not by Google in the way most people assume. IndexNow indexing Bing https://writemyseo.com/blog/server-side-rendering-decision.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/server-side-rendering-decision.html Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 SSR, SSG, ISR, and CSR are not ranked best to worst. They trade against each other, and the right choice depends on how your content changes. rendering SSR site architecture https://writemyseo.com/blog/internal-linking-graph-problem.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/internal-linking-graph-problem.html Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Your site is a directed graph and link equity flows through it. Treating internal links as a navigation concern rather than a distribution problem leaves most of the value on the table. internal linking site architecture PageRank https://writemyseo.com/blog/embeddings-semantic-search.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/embeddings-semantic-search.html Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search moved from matching strings to matching meaning via vector embeddings. Understanding the mechanism explains why keyword density stopped working and what replaced it. embeddings semantic search retrieval https://writemyseo.com/blog/index-bloat-crawl-to-index-ratio.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/index-bloat-crawl-to-index-ratio.html Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 The gap between pages you publish, pages Google crawls, and pages Google indexes is the most diagnostic number in technical SEO. Here is how to read it. indexing crawl budget technical SEO https://writemyseo.com/blog/search-console-sampling-thresholds.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/search-console-sampling-thresholds.html Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Anonymized query filtering, row limits, and property-level scoping mean the Performance report is a filtered view. Knowing what is missing changes how you use it. Search Console data quality GSC API https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-ai-search-picks-citations.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-ai-search-picks-citations.html Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Retrieval-augmented answers involve a retrieval step, a ranking step, and a generation step. Each one filters your content differently, and only the first resembles classic SEO. AI search RAG citations https://writemyseo.com/blog/llms-txt-what-it-does.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/llms-txt-what-it-does.html Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 A proposed standard for giving language models a clean map of your site. Worth understanding, worth a small implementation, not worth overstating. llms.txt AI search standards https://writemyseo.com/blog/schema-markup-that-earns-rich-results.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/schema-markup-that-earns-rich-results.html Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Structured data does not improve rankings directly. It qualifies pages for specific SERP treatments — and the list of treatments that still exist has shrunk. structured data schema.org rich results https://writemyseo.com/blog/core-web-vitals-field-vs-lab.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/core-web-vitals-field-vs-lab.html Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Lighthouse measures a simulated load on one machine. CrUX measures real users over 28 days. When they conflict, only one of them is what Google uses. Core Web Vitals performance CrUX https://writemyseo.com/blog/log-file-analysis-crawl-budget.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/log-file-analysis-crawl-budget.html Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Server logs are the only record of what search engines actually did on your site. A few command-line passes answer questions no third-party crawler can. log files crawl budget technical SEO https://writemyseo.com/blog/javascript-rendering-googlebot.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/javascript-rendering-googlebot.html Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Crawling and rendering are separate, queued stages. Understanding where the queue sits explains most JavaScript SEO problems and points at the fix. JavaScript SEO rendering crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/zero-click-search-numbers.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/zero-click-search-numbers.html Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Studies putting zero-click searches above half of all queries are measuring something more specific than the headline suggests. What the denominator includes changes the strategic conclusion entirely. zero-click SERP features measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/keyword-volume-data-accuracy.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/keyword-volume-data-accuracy.html Mon, 06 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search volume is a modeled, bucketed, annualized estimate — not a count. Understanding how the number is produced tells you exactly when to trust it and when it will burn you. keyword research data quality Keyword Planner https://writemyseo.com/blog/search-console-average-position.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/search-console-average-position.html Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Average position is a mean of a skewed distribution recorded only when you were shown at all. Here is what it actually measures and how to stop drawing the wrong conclusions from it. Search Console metrics reporting https://writemyseo.com/blog/ctr-curves-position-one.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/ctr-curves-position-one.html Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Organic CTR curves have flattened as SERPs filled with features. Here is how to read click-through data for your own site instead of borrowing someone else's curve. CTR Search Console SERP features