Technical SEO

Questions in Technical SEO

1. 1.

   What is technical SEO?

   Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines and AI crawlers find, crawl, render and index your pages, and understand how they relate. It covers site architecture, internal links, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, page speed, mobile usability, structured data and JavaScript rendering. Without it, good content may never be seen.

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2. 2.

   What are Core Web Vitals, and do they affect SEO?

   Core Web Vitals are Google's metrics for loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). Good scores are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of visits. Google's ranking systems use them, but relevance comes first.

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3. 3.

   When should I use a 301 redirect?

   Use a 301 (or 308) permanent redirect whenever a URL moves for good: a changed slug, merged pages, a new domain or a switch to HTTPS. It sends visitors and search engines to the new address and helps transfer ranking signals. Google recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year.

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4. 4.

   How do I migrate a website without losing SEO traffic?

   Plan the migration before any code changes: crawl and benchmark the old site, map every URL to its new equivalent with 301 redirects, keep content and metadata that rank, test on staging, then monitor crawl errors and rankings closely after launch. Google says to expect temporary ranking fluctuation, so nobody can promise zero impact.

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5. 5.

   Why isn't Google indexing my pages?

   The usual causes are a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, a canonical tag pointing elsewhere, pages Google sees as duplicate or low value, weak internal linking, or content that only appears after JavaScript runs. Google Search Console's Page indexing report and URL Inspection tool show the reason Google gives for each URL.

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6. 6.

   Can AI crawlers read JavaScript-rendered content?

   Often not. Googlebot renders JavaScript, but a Vercel analysis published in December 2024 found that major AI crawlers, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, fetched JavaScript files without executing them. If key content or links only appear after scripts run, those crawlers may see an empty page. Server-side rendering avoids the problem.

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7. 7.

   What does an SEO audit include?

   A thorough SEO audit reviews technical health (crawling, indexing, speed and rendering), on-page content and search intent, internal linking, backlinks and how you compare with competitors, then turns the findings into a prioritised plan. A current audit should also check AI crawler access and how AI assistants describe your brand.

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