A robots.txt mistake can wreck visibility faster than most site owners realize. Google’s documentation says robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they can access on your site, and it is mainly used to manage crawling, not to keep pages out of Google Search. That distinction matters because a bad rule can block Google from crawling important … Read more
A submitted sitemap does not mean your pages will rank. It does not even guarantee they will be crawled or indexed. Google’s own documentation says a sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site, but it does not guarantee that all items in the sitemap will be crawled and indexed. Google also says submitting … Read more
Canonical tags are supposed to reduce confusion, but a lot of sites use them in ways that create more of it. Google’s documentation says canonicalization is the process of selecting the representative URL from a set of duplicate pages, and a canonical tag is only a strong hint, not a command. So when websites misuse … Read more