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Guides
Short, specific write-ups on the parts of technical SEO where the common advice is wrong or out of date.
Meta Description Length: What Actually Gets Truncated
The number everyone quotes is 155 characters. The real rule is pixel width, and knowing the difference saves you from rewriting descriptions that were fine.
robots.txt Mistakes That Silently Deindex Pages
Five configuration errors that remove pages from Google without producing any error message anywhere.
Heading Structure: What H1–H6 Order Actually Does
Headings are document structure, not a ranking lever. Here is what they genuinely affect, and what is folklore.
What these guides have in common
Each one covers something you can check and fix in an afternoon, and each one leads with the part of the conventional advice that is wrong or out of date. That constraint is deliberate. There is no shortage of material explaining what a title tag is; there is very little that tells you the 155-character rule is a pixel measurement in disguise, or that disallowing a page prevents its noindex from ever being read.
The other shared property is that none of them require a tool subscription to act on. If a guide's conclusion is "buy this product", it does not belong here.
Where to start
If a page has dropped out of search results, read the robots.txt mistakes guide first — it covers the failure mode that produces no error message anywhere, which is why it takes people weeks to find.
If you are publishing new pages and want them to earn clicks, read the meta description guide, then check each page with the SERP Preview.
If you are cleaning up an older site, the heading structure guide is the one that usually uncovers a template problem affecting every page at once.
What is not covered here
There is no guide on link building, keyword research tooling, or content calendars. Those topics are saturated with material that is either obvious or wrong, and this site is deliberately about things you can check and fix in an afternoon.
There is also nothing here about AI-generated content at scale. Not because it is taboo, but because the useful advice depends entirely on what you are doing with it, and a general guide would be worthless to everyone.
How to read a technical SEO claim
Most bad advice in this field has the same shape: a rule stated as absolute, with no mention of what it was measured on. "Titles should be 60 characters" is a measurement of one font at one size on one device. "Keyword density should be 2%" was never measured on anything. When a rule has no conditions attached, that is the signal to check it rather than adopt it.
A useful test is to ask what would change the answer. If nothing would — if the rule holds regardless of your platform, audience or content type — it is probably a policy or a legal requirement, not an optimisation. Those are the only absolute rules in this field, and there are very few of them.
The second useful test is recency. Google's systems change continuously, and a claim that was verifiable in 2019 may now be simply false. Where a guide here makes a claim about current behaviour, it says when it was checked.
Corrections
If one of these guides is wrong about something, that is worth an email — see the contact page. Technical SEO advice ages badly, and several widely repeated claims were accurate five years ago and are not now. Being told which ones I have repeated is genuinely useful.