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Technical SEO

Articles on how a website is crawled, indexed and structured, and what goes wrong when it is not. Written from work on complicated sites.

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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 → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Hidden links, cloaking and injected links: what Google’s spam policies say A page can contain links that its owner never wrote and its visitors never see. Google's spam policies define hidden links, cloaking and hacked content, and… 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 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… 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 → 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 → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Outbound links: what you vouch for, and when to qualify a link Every outbound link on a page says something about its destination, and Google gives specific guidance on when to qualify one. This article sets out what… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Why links built by script can be invisible to crawlers A menu that works perfectly in a browser can leave a crawler with nothing to follow. Google documents which link formats it can use, and how… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Structured data: what Google supports, and what it does not promise Structured data gives Google explicit clues about a page and can make it eligible for rich results. Google's documentation is equally clear about what it does… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Sitemaps: what they do, what they do not, and how to keep them honest A sitemap tells Google which URLs you think matter. It helps discovery, but it guarantees neither crawling nor indexing, and a file full of redirected, blocked… Read the article → Technical SEO · 10 Oct 2026 · 6 min Security and spam problems as causes of a traffic drop Google lists security threats and spam-policy violations as separate causes of falling search traffic, each with its own Search Console report. This article sets out what… Read the article →

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What Technical SEO articles cover

Technical SEO is the work that decides whether search engines can find, read and understand a site. Each article here starts from one specific issue met on a complicated website, such as links that stop pointing where they should or audit findings that never reach the people who could act on them, and explains the SEO problem behind it.

The service itself covers crawling, indexing, architecture, JavaScript, international SEO, migrations and large-site analysis. The guides alongside set out each area, using Google Search Central as the reference. Articles are written by Dean Cruddace, and where one relies on Google's documentation it links to the page it uses.

Related guides

Crawling and indexing

How crawling, sitemaps and canonicals shape what gets indexed.

Site architecture

How structure, URLs and internal links affect how a site is crawled.

JavaScript SEO and rendering

Whether the content is really there when Google looks.

Migrations

Moving a site without losing what it has earned.

About the Technical SEO category

What is technical SEO?

It is the work that makes sure search engines can crawl, render, index and understand a website. Google's SEO Starter Guide covers the fundamentals.

Where can I read how Google crawls and indexes sites?

Google Search Central explains the stages in its documentation on how Search works, and covers crawling controls such as robots.txt and sitemaps.

Can Cultured Digital review a site's technical SEO?

Yes. Technical SEO is the flagship service: an audit, a prioritised roadmap, implementation and QA. See Technical SEO, or describe the problem.

Editorial standard

What gets published in Technical SEO, and what doesn’t.

Yes
Original analysis. Experiments with a stated method. Technical breakdowns. Things learned on real projects.
No
Round-ups, recycled advice, and anything published only to have published something.