01
Index bloat nobody planned
Faceted navigation quietly generating thousands of near-identical URLs. Every one of them competes with the real page and eats the budget that should have gone to it.
How I fix itThe unglamorous work that everything else depends on
If Google cannot crawl, render and index your pages quickly, nothing else you do to them matters. Crawl budget, index bloat, Core Web Vitals, schema and the migration checks that stop traffic disappearing.
Google is spending your crawl budget on pages you do not sell
On most sites over a few hundred URLs, a large share of what Google crawls is filter combinations, tag archives and parameter duplicates. Meanwhile the pages that make money get visited once a fortnight.
02
Vitals failing on the templates that matter
Site-wide scores look fine because the blog drags the average up. The product template, the one people actually buy from, is the one failing.
How I fix it
03
A migration with no redirect map
The single fastest way to lose years of earned ranking. It is entirely preventable and I have cleaned up enough of them to know exactly where it goes wrong.
How I fix it
0%
Traffic lost migrating an industrial supplier from Magento to Shopify Plus
4,100
URLs mapped and redirected in that migration
-71%
Duplicate URLs removed on a 340 product catalogue
2 to 4
Weeks before technical fixes usually show in Search Console
Figures come from client accounts between 2023 and 2026. Technical fixes show up faster than content work, which is why they usually go first.
A fix list ordered by what it is worth, not by severity colour
Every crawl tool will hand you nine hundred issues coloured red. Most of them do not matter. The job is deciding which twelve are keeping pages out of the index and doing those.
Core Web Vitals measured per template, not site-wide
An average across every URL hides the problem. I look at the templates that carry your revenue and work on those with your developer, in the order that moves the number.
How a technical engagement runs
STEP 01
Crawl
Full crawl and log review, cross-checked against Search Console so we are looking at reality rather than a simulation.
STEP 02
Triage
Issues ranked by what they cost you. You get a list with the top items and an honest note on what each one takes to fix.
STEP 03
Fix
I work through it with your developer, or handle what I can directly. Everything goes on a shared board so nothing gets lost.
STEP 04
Verify
Re-crawl and confirm in Search Console. A fix that was never verified is not a fix.
We replatformed and I was braced for the usual traffic drop everyone warns you about. It never came. The redirect map was ready weeks before we launched and Camille sat on the call during the switch.
Dan Reyes
Owner, Northside Heating and CoolingTechnical questions I get asked
Do you need developer access?
Usually not. I prefer to write the brief and let your developer implement it, because they know your build and your deploy process. If you have no developer I can do the CMS-level work myself.
How big does my site need to be for this to be worth it?
Roughly 300 URLs and up, or any site that lost traffic after a redesign regardless of size. Below that, on-page work usually gives you more for the money.
Can you guarantee Core Web Vitals will pass?
No, and be careful with anyone who does. On a theme you control I can usually get there. On a heavily customised build with six third-party scripts, some of it comes down to decisions that are not mine to make.
When should I bring you in on a migration?
Before the new site is built, not after. The redirect map and the URL structure are decisions, and by launch week they have already been made. Two weeks before go-live is late but salvageable.
Want to know what Google is actually crawling?
Send me your URL. I will record a 10 minute walkthrough of the crawl and index problems I can see from the outside.