"Pages closer to the root rank better — keep URLs shallow." No. Google ranks by click depth, not slash count. Here's the distinction people miss: /a/b/c/d/product looks "deep" in the URL string, but i…
"Strip stop words (a, the, for, and) from URLs and titles." Mostly pointless. The URL part is defensible on length grounds — shorter, cleaner slugs read better, so dropping "the" and "and" from /the-b…
"Google's passage indexing means I don't need good structure anymore." Backwards. What Google announced (2020, "passage ranking") was the ability to rank a specific passage from a page even when the o…
"Trailing slashes hurt SEO." No. They're just a different URL. Here's the technical reality: to a server, /page and /page/ can be two distinct resources. Neither is "better" for ranking. The SEO probl…
"Always use exact-match anchor text for internal links." Easy there. For internal links, descriptive anchors do help Google understand the target — that part's real. But "always exact-match" turns a g…
"Breadcrumb schema boosts your rankings." No. Structured data is not a ranking factor — Google has stated this directly about schema in general. Here's what actually happens: BreadcrumbList markup cha…
