Technical foundations
Technical SEO that gets your right pages in, and the wrong ones out.
The unglamorous work that decides whether anything else holds. If Google cannot read the pages that sell, or is busy reading thousands that do not, no amount of writing will fix it. This is the part I fix first.
What technical SEO covers
Everything about the site that decides whether Google can find, read and trust your pages, as opposed to what the pages say. Whether the important pages are in Google's index at all. Whether thousands of junk pages are drowning them. Whether two versions of the same page are competing. Whether the addresses redirect cleanly after years of changes. Whether the site loads fast enough on a phone. Whether someone has pointed spam at you.
Most of it is invisible to the business owner. You see the symptom: traffic that dropped, a service page that will not rank, a Search Console count that looks alarming. My job is to find the cause behind the symptom, fix it in a way that can be undone if it turns out wrong, and write down every decision.
The problems I am usually called in for
Pages Google will not show
Large parts of the site sitting in Search Console as crawled but not indexed, discovered but not indexed, or duplicates Google chose to ignore. Usually overlapping pages, thin pages or pages generated by software.
A site buried in its own exhaust
Listing feeds, filters, tag archives and calendars producing thousands of near-identical addresses, so Google spends its visits on noise instead of the pages that earn.
Spam links pointed at the site
Thousands of low-quality sites linking to you on purpose, sometimes by a competitor, sometimes by a spam network. Google is usually good at ignoring these, but not always.
Years of broken addresses
Old pages returning errors, chains of redirects pointing at redirects, and internal links to pages that no longer exist. Each is small; together they leak strength and waste crawling.
Traffic that fell and nobody knows why
A drop after an update, a redesign or a migration. The first job is telling apart a penalty, a Google change, a technical break and a normal seasonal dip, because each needs a different response.
A property site Google could not read
A Las Vegas brokerage came to me with a site its own listings software had flooded: sold homes, expired listings and every filter combination the search box could make, tens of thousands of automatically generated pages. Somewhere under them were 237 pages of real content the business actually runs on.
An audit separated the real site from the exhaust. Every page got a decision, and every decision was written down and prioritised for a developer. The faults only the listings vendor could fix were packaged into an action sheet and chased with the people holding the keys. On top of the cleaned structure went a steady content rhythm mapped to what Las Vegas owners, tenants and investors ask.
By September 2026, 27 of the brokerage's pages were being quoted in AI answers across Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, as counted by Ahrefs on 2 September. Other websites linking in rose to 570, from 66 in March. Visits from Google in the 28 days to 31 August were 778, from 497 the month the work began.
A law firm's unindexed-page report, worked back down
In June 2026, Search Console listed 4,144 pages for a Las Vegas injury firm as Crawled - currently not indexed. That report does not show whether those pages had been indexed before or why Google left them out. I reviewed overlapping posts, worked through a spam-link cleanup and recorded reversible decisions instead of bulk deleting pages. On 3 September 2026, the same Search Console bucket counted 2,549 pages. The count changed; it does not by itself prove which pages became indexed or what caused the change.
How the work runs
Measure before touching
Search Console, a full crawl of the site, the server's own records where available, and a backup of everything I might change. Nothing is fixed until I can prove what it was before.
Group the problems into patterns
Thousands of bad pages are almost always a handful of causes. Fixing the pattern fixes the thousands, so the audit is organised by cause, not by address.
A written decision per group
Improve, merge and redirect, keep out of the index on purpose, or leave alone. Each one reversible, each one recorded with the date and the reason.
Fix in order of what it opens up
The fixes that let Google reach and read your money pages come first. Speed and polish come after, because a fast page Google has refused is still refused.
Check it held
Search Console is read again after the fix has had time to be recrawled, and the result goes in the report with the date it was read.
What I will not do
I will not bulk delete pages to make a number look better. Deleting throws away links and history, and it turns a bad month into a permanent one. I will not disavow links on a hunch; the disavow tool is for a real pattern of spam, and used carelessly it can switch off links that were helping. And I will not sell you a speed score as if it were a ranking. Speed matters for visitors and Google does measure it, but a site does not climb from page three to page one because a test went from 70 to 95.
Signs you need technical SEO services, not more content
Your page count in Google is falling
Search Console's Pages report shows fewer indexed pages month on month while you keep publishing. New writing is going into a site Google is reading less of.
Google shows the wrong page
A blog post, an old page or a tag archive appears for the search your service page should win. Google is confused about which page is the real one.
Impressions without clicks
You are shown a lot and chosen rarely, or the titles and descriptions Google displays are not the ones you wrote. Both point at pages Google cannot read the way you intended.
A sudden drop after a change
Traffic fell soon after a redesign, a new plugin, a platform move or a hosting change. Something in the move broke what Google relied on.
Strange links or pages you did not make
Pages in Google with your address and content you never wrote, or a flood of links from sites in languages you do not speak. That is a security or spam problem before it is a ranking one.
Who this is for
Businesses whose site has grown messy over years, or was built by several people in turn, or sits on a platform that generates pages on its own. Firms that have just had a drop and need to know what it was before they spend anything. And anyone about to redesign or move their site, because the technical work done before a migration is far cheaper than the rescue after one.
The parts of technical SEO, one page each
An SEO audit is the diagnosis on its own, with a prioritised plan. Fixing indexing problems covers pages Google will not show. Spam link cleanup covers links pointed at you on purpose.
Questions people ask about technical SEO
Do I need technical SEO if my site is new
Less than an old site, but the foundations are cheapest to get right at the start: clean addresses, a sitemap, one version of each page, and measurement wired in before launch rather than after.
Will you need access to my hosting
Usually to Search Console and the website's admin. Server access helps for the harder problems but is not always needed. Where a fix belongs to someone else, such as a software vendor, I write it up for them and chase it.
How do I know if I have been hit by a penalty
A manual penalty appears in Search Console under Manual Actions and names the problem. If that report is empty, you have not been penalised, whatever your traffic is doing.
Can technical fixes make things worse
They can if they are done blindly. That is why every change is backed up, reversible and recorded, and why the biggest ones are made one group at a time.
Is site speed the most important part
No. It matters, and I fix it where it is poor, but whether Google can reach and trust your important pages matters far more to where you rank.
Something on your site feels broken?
Send me the address and what you have noticed. I will look before I reply, and tell you whether it is technical and how serious.
The property site rescue · What crawled, currently not indexed means