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Cluster 02 / 08
Technical SEO
The infrastructure layer — crawlability, Core Web Vitals, mobile, schema, sitemaps. If technical is broken, no amount of content fixes the rankings.
Technical SEO is the infrastructure layer underneath every other discipline. Crawlability, page speed, mobile rendering, schema, sitemaps, canonicals, architecture — when these are wrong, no amount of content quality fixes the rankings.
This is the Technical SEO cluster — nine articles that establish the working baseline. Read in order if you're auditing a site from scratch, or jump to the chapter that matches the failure on your current technical to-do list.
The investment compounds: a site that passes the technical floor inherits ranking lift on every article it ships afterwards. A site that doesn't bleeds rankings every quarter, regardless of how good the content is.
Articles in this cluster
Read in order, or jump to the chapter you need. Each article ends with a link to the next one.
- 01Chapter 01 of 09
Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP, and CLS — the three metrics Google actually uses to judge whether your page is fast, responsive, and stable. What each one measures, what fails them, and how to fix.
11 min readRead chapter 
02Chapter 02 of 09Page speed
What page speed actually is in 2026 (it's not just LCP), why it matters more for revenue than ranking, and the fix sequence that compounds — from server response to render to interaction.
9 min readRead chapter
03Chapter 03 of 09Mobile SEO
Mobile-first indexing means Google ranks the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. What changes when you optimise for that — and the gaps that quietly destroy rankings on phones.
9 min readRead chapter
04Chapter 04 of 09Crawling and indexing
Two distinct stages, two distinct failure modes. What stops Googlebot from crawling, what stops it from indexing, and how to diagnose either one from Search Console without guessing.
9 min readRead chapter
05Chapter 05 of 09XML sitemaps
What sitemaps actually do (and don't), what to put in them, what to leave out, and the structure that scales from a 50-page site to a 5-million-URL marketplace.
8 min readRead chapter
06Chapter 06 of 09robots.txt
What robots.txt actually controls (it doesn't prevent indexing), the syntax that matters, and the AI-engine bot rules every site needs in 2026 — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude.
8 min readRead chapter
07Chapter 07 of 09Canonical tags
What canonicals actually do, when they matter, and how to set them on a multi-locale, multi-parameter, multi-source site without quietly torching the URLs you want indexed.
8 min readRead chapter
08Chapter 08 of 09Website architecture
How URLs are organised, how internal links flow, and how depth-from-homepage affects what gets crawled and ranked. The structure that compounds vs the structure that fragments.
9 min readRead chapter
09Chapter 09 of 09JavaScript SEO
Modern Google renders JavaScript — but how, and with what limits, decides whether your SPA, your React shop, or your dynamic content gets indexed at all. The render-or-die rules for 2026.
10 min readRead chapter