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Screenshot of the Link Signals website: "Your site links to hundreds of places. Who owns them now?", with an example page showing a hidden link that visitors cannot see but search engines can.

Featured · Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026

Expired domains in your outbound links: an SEO risk that audits miss

Every outbound link is a small promise that the destination is what you think it is. When the domain behind it lapses and is re-registered, the promise breaks and your page still carries the link.

AI Search · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min What blocking Google-Extended, GPTBot or PerplexityBot actually does Blocking an AI crawler is a one-line change in robots.txt, but each line controls something different. Here is what Google, OpenAI and Perplexity document for each… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Crawl budget: when it matters and when it does not Crawl budget is one of the most over-diagnosed problems in SEO. Google’s own guide says who it is for, and for most sites the honest answer… Read the article → Search · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Diagnosing a traffic drop before acting on it When organic traffic falls, the pressure to do something quickly is real, and the wrong response can make matters worse. Google's own guidance gives a way… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Why SEO audits stall, and how to write findings people act on The usual end of an SEO audit is a long document read once and then shelved. The analysis is rarely the problem. The hand-over is. Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min How Google picks a canonical URL, and why your preference is only a hint When the same content is reachable at several URLs, Google clusters them and chooses one to show. You can state a preference, but the choice stays… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Prioritising SEO work: impact, effort and the dependencies people forget Every audit produces more work than any team can do. Choosing what comes first is the part clients pay for, and where weak engagements show. Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min When a working link is reported as broken: 403s, 429s and bot protection Broken-link reports are only as good as their classification. Two well-known sites were reported as dead while working for every human visitor, and the same behaviour… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min hreflang: the return-tag failure that voids the rest Hreflang annotations only count when pages point to each other. Here is what Google documents about return tags, codes, self-reference, x-default and the three ways to… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min How to judge an SEO strategy fairly Search traffic moves for many reasons at once. Judging a strategy by a single line on a chart is unfair to the strategy and to the… Read the article → Strategy · 10 Oct 2026 · 5 min Why a one-off link audit goes stale The links on your pages change without anyone editing them. An audit is a snapshot; the risk lives in what happens after it. Read the article → Development · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Launching a product site: the search basics Google documents A product launch has a long list of things to decide, and search is usually near the bottom. Google’s documentation is short on product advice but… Read the article →

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