Guides

Plain explanations of the problems I'm hired to fix, written for 2026 and kept up to date. Each one stands on its own, and each ends with how I handle the problem for clients.

AI search

• How AI assistants decide what to say about your business: training data versus live retrieval, which search indexes feed ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Copilot, the crawlers behind them, and what to do this quarter.
• Structured data in 2026: which schema markup is worth adding: the rich results that remain, the ones Google retired, and building an entity graph that search engines and assistants can trust.
• How to use AI coding assistants on a business website safely: specs, project memory, automated checks, review, and keeping secrets and production out of reach.

Diagnosis

• How to diagnose a Google traffic drop in Search Console: confirm the drop, find where it is, line it up with dates, and name the cause.
• "Crawled, currently not indexed": what it means and how to fix it: a method for finding the real cause behind Search Console's most misunderstood status.
• How to tell if JavaScript is hiding your content from Google and AI: five tests, the common causes, and the fixes developers can ship.
• ADA website compliance for businesses: the six fixes that cover most of the legal risk, what to skip, and the search and AI benefits that come with them.
• Lynx for website QA: scripted text browser checks for thin pages, stray noindex tags, and broken links before every launch.

Technical SEO

• Canonical tags: how Google chooses which URL to index: the signals Google weighs, the Search Console statuses, and the mistakes that send rankings to the wrong page.
• How robots.txt works, and the mistakes that cost traffic: matching rules, crawling versus indexing, status codes, and AI crawlers.
• Faceted navigation SEO: filters, parameters, and crawl budget: which filter pages to index and how to keep the rest out of the crawl.
• hreflang for English-language sites serving the US, UK, Canada, and Australia: the codes, the return links, and the errors that void them.

Speed and infrastructure

• Core Web Vitals explained: LCP, INP, CLS, and the fixes that work: field data versus lab data, and what moves each number.
• Cloudflare settings that help or hurt SEO and AI crawlers: proxying, bot protection, AI crawler controls, caching, HTTPS, and edge redirects.

Migrations and redirects

• The website migration SEO checklist: the URL inventory, the 301 redirect map, launch day, and the weeks after.
• How to plan 301 redirects that keep your rankings and links: which redirect to use, mapping, implementation by platform, testing, and how long to keep them.

Analytics

• Google Consent Mode v2 for GA4: a practical setup guide: the four signals, basic and advanced mode, regional defaults, and how to verify it.

Email and domains

• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for every domain that sends email: what each record does, the Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft requirements, and how to reach enforcement safely.
• Why business email lands in spam, and how to find the cause: headers, authentication failures, reputation, blocklists, and sending practices.

Privacy and reputation

• How to remove your personal information from data brokers and search: opt-outs, Google's Results about you, and California's DROP.

Reference

• Glossary of SEO, AI search, and technical website terms: plain definitions, from 301 redirects to XML sitemaps.

How these guides are written

Each guide answers one question completely, with the definitions and context needed to act on it, and carries the date it was last updated. They're written from the work itself: the problems clients bring me, the tests I run, and the fixes that hold.

New guides are announced in the Atom feed.

Updated October 6, 2026