The guides
What a machine reads on your site
Eight guides, one signal each. Each explains what a search engine reads on a page, what decides its verdict, and how to check it from the page as served. Several are written from our own incidents — dated, fixed, and told because the fix is verifiable.
The eight guides
Indexing
Getting your page indexed
"Discovered – currently not indexed": the seven signals that decide indexing, and how to keep them in order.
Indexing
The canonical URL
Designating the page of record, and the five rules that keep your pages on the index's good side.
Languages
hreflang: the complete cluster
The reciprocity rule, x-default, and the mistake that pulled six of our eight languages out of the index on 1 September 2026.
Crawling
A sitemap that tells the truth
The last-modified date is the most frequently wrong field in a sitemap. What it costs you, and how to keep it accurate.
Crawling
IndexNow
Telling search engines instead of waiting for them: what the key proves, and the six rules that make a submission credible.
Signals
Title and description: the right lengths
Four limits, upper and lower, that hold in every language you serve. Where they come from and how to stay within them.
Signals
Structured data
JSON-LD: the golden rule, the types that still matter, and why markup that no longer pays off should be removed.
Assistants
Getting cited by AI assistants
An assistant doesn't rank: it cites. What makes a page citable, and why this channel is measured rather than assumed.
Why our incidents are written up here
A site that sells SEO auditing owes it to itself to hold to its own markers. Ours holds them across its eight languages, and a guard halts publication at the slightest discrepancy. That discipline was learned: the plan dated pages that had stayed identical, the language declarations covered only part of the group, and markers spilled over onto the translated versions while the French stayed correct. Each of these episodes is dated in the guide that concerns it, along with the fix that was applied. A method sells when you apply it to yourself first.
See these signals on your site
The Checker reads your address and reports back the state of the signals described in these guides, free of charge, in about ten seconds. Your site remains entirely your own. The Audit SEO Records then reads your whole plan, page by page, and hands you the dated findings.