https://writemyseo.com/blog/ Daily notes on SEO data and SEO technology from WriteMySEO. en-us Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:27:38 +0000 https://writemyseo.com/blog/googlebot-s-crawl-rate-is-a-feedback-loop-not-a-dial.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/googlebot-s-crawl-rate-is-a-feedback-loop-not-a-dial.html Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How Google's crawl capacity limit responds to response times and error codes, and how to tell from logs whether your crawling is capacity-limited or demand-limited. crawling log files crawl budget Search Console https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-your-schema-validates-but-no-rich-result-appears.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-your-schema-validates-but-no-rich-result-appears.html Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Validation only proves eligibility. Learn the three gates between markup and a rich result, and how to measure actual appearance in Search Console and BigQuery. structured data rich results Search Console BigQuery https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-bm25-saturates-and-extra-keywords-stop-counting.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-bm25-saturates-and-extra-keywords-stop-counting.html Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Lexical retrieval scores term frequency with built-in diminishing returns and a length penalty. Here's the math, and what it means for how you write and chunk pages. retrieval bm25 site search ranking https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-picks-the-date-shown-next-to-your-result.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-picks-the-date-shown-next-to-your-result.html Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Google infers snippet dates from several conflicting signals your CMS emits. How date extraction works, why bumping dateModified backfires, and how to audit it. structured data snippets freshness dates https://writemyseo.com/blog/410-vs-404-how-google-actually-retires-a-url.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/410-vs-404-how-google-actually-retires-a-url.html Sun, 11 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How Googlebot treats 404, 410, 403, 429 and 503 responses, why dead URLs keep getting crawled for months, and how to measure removal time with the URL Inspection API. crawling http status codes indexing URL Inspection API https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-backlink-tools-disagree-about-your-link-count.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-backlink-tools-disagree-about-your-link-count.html Sat, 10 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 A backlink index is a sample of one vendor's crawl, not a registry. How discovery, recrawl cadence, and counting rules create gaps, and which link numbers to trust. backlinks link data crawling measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-crawl-stats-and-your-server-logs-never-match.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-crawl-stats-and-your-server-logs-never-match.html Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search Console's Crawl Stats report and your origin access logs count different events. Here's where each one is blind, and how to reconcile the two. crawl stats log files Search Console crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-prerendering-does-to-your-core-web-vitals-data.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-prerendering-does-to-your-core-web-vitals-data.html Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Speculation Rules can push LCP toward zero without your pages getting faster. How prerendered navigations are measured, and how to keep your field data honest. core web vitals crux prerendering analytics https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-how-often-google-rewrites-your-title-tags.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-how-often-google-rewrites-your-title-tags.html Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Google replaces title links more often than most teams realize. Here's the mechanism behind rewrites, a repeatable way to measure your own rewrite rate, and how to read the CTR data. title tags SERP data search console measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-the-render-gap-between-your-html-and-the-dom.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-the-render-gap-between-your-html-and-the-dom.html Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How to diff server HTML against the rendered DOM at scale, which differences actually affect indexing, and why your headless Chrome isn't Googlebot's renderer. rendering javascript googlebot crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/segmented-xml-sitemaps-turn-indexing-into-measurable-data.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/segmented-xml-sitemaps-turn-indexing-into-measurable-data.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search Console reports indexing per submitted sitemap. Splitting sitemaps by template and publish cohort turns a vague coverage number into per-segment indexation rates. sitemaps indexing Search Console crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/decomposing-a-traffic-drop-into-demand-mix-and-ctr.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/decomposing-a-traffic-drop-into-demand-mix-and-ctr.html Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 A shift-share method for splitting a Search Console click decline into query demand, segment mix, ranking position, and CTR — with the math and the SQL to run it. Search Console measurement analytics BigQuery https://writemyseo.com/blog/cdn-cache-keys-decide-which-page-googlebot-sees.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/cdn-cache-keys-decide-which-page-googlebot-sees.html Sat, 26 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Your edge cache chooses the HTML Googlebot receives. Here's how cache keys, Vary headers and personalization cause wrong-variant indexing, and how to diagnose it. cdn caching crawling http headers https://writemyseo.com/blog/cosine-similarity-scores-don-t-mean-what-tools-imply.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/cosine-similarity-scores-don-t-mean-what-tools-imply.html Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Embedding similarity scores are model-relative, not absolute. Why anisotropy and chunking distort them, and how to normalize against a reference set of ranking pages. embeddings vector search content optimization retrieval https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-crawled-currently-not-indexed-actually-tells-you.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-crawled-currently-not-indexed-actually-tells-you.html Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 The Page indexing report labels the pipeline stage where a URL stopped, not the reason it's bad. How to read each state and build a cohort measurement that survives recomputation. search console indexing crawling measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-googlebot-discovers-item-4-000-in-a-paginated-list.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-googlebot-discovers-item-4-000-in-a-paginated-list.html Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Pagination problems are crawl-depth problems, not markup problems. Here's the arithmetic behind link depth, the canonical mistakes that slow discovery, and how to measure it. pagination crawling internal links log files https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-the-search-console-bigquery-export-really-gives-you.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-the-search-console-bigquery-export-really-gives-you.html Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 The bulk data export isn't Search Console with more rows. Learn its two grains, zero-based positions, anonymized-query rows, and how to reconcile the numbers. Search Console BigQuery measurement analytics https://writemyseo.com/blog/finding-near-duplicate-pages-before-google-clusters-them.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/finding-near-duplicate-pages-before-google-clusters-them.html Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How to detect near-duplicate pages at scale with shingling, MinHash and embeddings \u2014 including why boilerplate wrecks the numbers and how to calibrate thresholds. duplicate content embeddings canonicalization crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/the-75th-percentile-is-why-your-cwv-fix-looks-invisible.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/the-75th-percentile-is-why-your-cwv-fix-looks-invisible.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Core Web Vitals numbers disagree across CrUX, PageSpeed Insights, Search Console and your RUM because of percentile math, 28-day windows, and URL grouping. core web vitals crux measurement performance https://writemyseo.com/blog/building-a-ctr-curve-from-your-own-search-console-data.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/building-a-ctr-curve-from-your-own-search-console-data.html Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Published CTR-by-position tables don't fit your site. Here's how to fit your own from Search Console, and the averaging bias that makes naive curves wrong. Search Console CTR measurement BigQuery https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-blocking-gptbot-and-google-extended-actually-does.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-blocking-gptbot-and-google-extended-actually-does.html Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 AI crawler controls are not one switch. Here's what each robots.txt token governs, which ones cannot remove you from AI answers, and how to verify enforcement in logs. ai crawlers robots.txt AI search log analysis https://writemyseo.com/blog/diagnosing-keyword-cannibalization-from-query-url-data.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/diagnosing-keyword-cannibalization-from-query-url-data.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Two of your URLs ranking for one query is usually not a problem. Here's how to compute a real cannibalization signal from Search Console data and when to act on it. Search Console cannibalization bigquery measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-decides-your-200-response-is-a-soft-404.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-decides-your-200-response-is-a-soft-404.html Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Soft 404s are Google overriding the status code you sent. Here's what triggers the classification, how to detect it at scale, and which empty states deserve which response. soft 404 indexing status codes javascript seo https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-passage-and-chunk-retrieval-break-up-your-pages.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-passage-and-chunk-retrieval-break-up-your-pages.html Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search and AI systems increasingly score fragments of a page, not the whole page. Here's how that splitting works and how to write sections that survive it. passage ranking embeddings AI search content structure https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-google-ignores-your-rel-canonical-and-picks-another-url.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-google-ignores-your-rel-canonical-and-picks-another-url.html Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How Google clusters duplicate URLs and selects a representative, which signals outweigh your rel=canonical, and how to diagnose overrides with the URL Inspection API. canonicalization indexing URL Inspection API Search Console https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-lastmod-actually-does-in-an-xml-sitemap.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/what-lastmod-actually-does-in-an-xml-sitemap.html Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Google uses sitemap lastmod only when it is verifiably accurate. Here is how build pipelines destroy that accuracy and how to generate dates worth trusting. sitemaps crawling indexing Search Console https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-time-to-index-with-the-url-inspection-api.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-time-to-index-with-the-url-inspection-api.html Sat, 12 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How to measure your site's real indexing latency instead of quoting vendor averages — the API fields that matter, polling design, and how to tell discovery from selection delays. Search Console indexing crawling measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-your-rank-tracker-and-search-console-disagree.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-your-rank-tracker-and-search-console-disagree.html Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search Console's average position and your rank tracker are produced by different mechanisms. Here's how each number is built, where it misleads, and which to trust for what. Search Console rank tracking measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-etags-and-last-modified-change-what-googlebot-crawls.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-etags-and-last-modified-change-what-googlebot-crawls.html Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Googlebot sends conditional requests. Most sites answer them with a full 200. Here's how validators work, where they break, and how to measure your 304 rate from logs. crawling http caching log analysis googlebot https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-hreflang-clusters-break-and-how-to-verify-them.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-hreflang-clusters-break-and-how-to-verify-them.html Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 hreflang is a graph, not a tag. Learn how Google builds language clusters, the four failure modes that silently drop them, and how to validate the graph yourself. hreflang international seo canonicalization crawling https://writemyseo.com/blog/separating-real-googlebot-from-fakes-in-your-logs.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/separating-real-googlebot-from-fakes-in-your-logs.html Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 User-agent strings are trivially spoofed. Here's how forward-confirmed reverse DNS and published IP range files let you verify which crawlers actually hit your server. log files crawling googlebot bot verification https://writemyseo.com/blog/faceted-navigation-creates-more-urls-than-you-think.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/faceted-navigation-creates-more-urls-than-you-think.html Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Filter combinations multiply exponentially. How to count your real crawl space, choose which facets deserve indexing, and pick the right control for each URL pattern. crawling faceted navigation robots.txt canonicalization https://writemyseo.com/blog/where-keyword-volume-numbers-come-from-and-why-they-re-wrong.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/where-keyword-volume-numbers-come-from-and-why-they-re-wrong.html Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search volume is a modeled, rounded, and aggregated estimate from an ads forecasting tool. Here's how it's produced, where it breaks, and how to use it anyway. keyword research search volume Keyword Planner measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-to-split-test-seo-changes-without-fooling-yourself.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-to-split-test-seo-changes-without-fooling-yourself.html Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Before-and-after comparisons can't separate your change from seasonality, core updates, and index churn. Here's how URL-level SEO split tests actually work. experimentation Search Console measurement analytics https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-s-robots-txt-parser-resolves-conflicting-rules.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/how-google-s-robots-txt-parser-resolves-conflicting-rules.html Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Rule order doesn't decide what Googlebot crawls — path length does. How group selection, longest-match precedence, wildcards, and error handling actually work. robots.txt crawling technical seo https://writemyseo.com/blog/modeling-internal-pagerank-from-your-own-crawl.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/modeling-internal-pagerank-from-your-own-crawl.html Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Click depth is a weak proxy for internal link value. Here's how to build a link graph from a crawl, run PageRank on it, and read the output without fooling yourself. internal linking pagerank crawling link graph https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-search-console-query-totals-never-add-up.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/why-search-console-query-totals-never-add-up.html Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 The sum of query rows in Search Console is smaller than the reported total, page rows can be larger, and average position cannot be averaged. Here's the mechanism. Search Console measurement data quality https://writemyseo.com/blog/schema-org-graph-modeling.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/schema-org-graph-modeling.html Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How to use @id references to link Organization, WebSite, WebPage, and Article nodes into a coherent graph — plus where Google follows references and where it won't. structured data schema.org json-ld https://writemyseo.com/blog/ai-overview-appearance-tracking.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/ai-overview-appearance-tracking.html Mon, 31 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 Search Console won't break out AI Overview impressions. Here's what is actually measurable, why scraped AIO data is noisy, and a manual check protocol you can repeat. AI search AI Overviews Search Console measurement https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-brand-search-lift.html https://writemyseo.com/blog/measuring-brand-search-lift.html Sun, 30 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000 How to use branded query volume in Search Console as a downstream measure of content that never converts directly — plus the anonymization traps, confounders, and power limits. search console branded search measurement attribution