Technical SEO attracts more folklore than almost any other area of web work. The durable parts are unglamorous: make pages reachable, make them fast, make them structured, and make them worth reading. Tactics built on exploiting current ranking behaviour age badly and occasionally cause lasting damage.

Crawlability comes first

  • Check robots.txt is not blocking anything important — including CSS and JavaScript needed to render pages.
  • Ensure a current sitemap is submitted and contains only canonical, indexable URLs.
  • Fix crawl errors and server errors in search console; they consume crawl budget and suppress indexing.
  • Verify pages render usefully without client-side JavaScript where possible, and test how your pages actually render if they depend on it.

One URL per piece of content

Duplicate content most often comes from the same page being reachable at multiple addresses: with and without trailing slashes, with tracking parameters, over both HTTP and HTTPS, and on both the www and bare domain. Pick one canonical form, redirect the rest permanently, and set canonical tags consistently.

Structure the page for meaning

One h1 describing the page, headings in a sensible order, descriptive link text rather than "click here", and structured data where it genuinely applies — articles, products, organisations, FAQs. Structured data is not a ranking shortcut; it is a way of stating unambiguously what a page is.

Speed and stability count

Loading performance and layout stability are measured on real user experience. The work is the same as general performance work: optimise images, remove unnecessary third-party scripts, reserve space for late-loading elements, and test on a mid-range phone rather than a developer machine.

Volume is not a strategy

Publishing large quantities of thin or near-duplicate content is explicitly targeted by search engines as scaled content abuse, and the penalty applies to the whole domain rather than the offending pages alone. A smaller library of genuinely useful articles, published at a sustainable pace, outperforms mass production and carries none of the risk.

Do the boring maintenance

Fix broken internal links, update outdated pages rather than publishing near-duplicates, remove or consolidate pages that serve no purpose, and keep redirects working after migrations. This unglamorous maintenance consistently outperforms tactical experiments, and it does not stop working when the algorithm changes.