Writing
Notes
Working notes on the parts of a migration that decide whether traffic survives it. Methodology, not commentary.
- Indexation 6 min read
Staging sites get indexed because robots.txt was never the right tool
Disallow stops crawling. It does not stop indexing. A staging URL linked from a public ticket can be indexed without Google ever fetching it — and blocking it is what guarantees the noindex tag is never seen.
- Diagnostics 8 min read
Why traffic drops after a replatform when URLs did not change
Six causes account for nearly all of it. Each leaves a distinct fingerprint in the data, so identifying which one you have takes about an hour.
- Measurement 6 min read
Measuring migration success without fooling yourself
The first two weeks of post-launch data mix recrawled pages with pages Google has not looked at yet. Here is what to measure instead, and when.
- Redirects 7 min read
How to build a redirect map that actually holds
Most redirect maps are built from a traffic export, which is why most redirect maps miss the URLs carrying the links. Here is the method that does not.
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