We nofollowed 11,000 faceted-nav links and the category pages woke up. PageRank sculpting isn't dead. 'Nofollow sculpting died in 2009' — sure, the old hack did. But faceted navigation still hemorrhag…
We turned OFF the related-posts widget and conversions rose 12%. Auto-widgets are lazy linking. A content site ran a plugin that auto-injected 6 'related' posts under every article — by tag similarity…
unpopular opinion: click depth is the rankings lever nobody on your team is measuring. A marketplace had 18,000 listing pages buried 5-6 clicks from the homepage. Pagination hell: page 1 → page 2 → pa…
controversial but: we made internal anchors LESS natural and rankings jumped 3 positions. Everyone parrots 'use natural internal anchors, click here is fine.' A B2B blog took that gospel literally — 6…
We deleted 80 footer links and traffic went UP. Mega-footers are a tax, not a feature. E-commerce site, classic bloated footer: 94 links on every single page — 'About', 'Careers', payment icons, every…
We found 403 orphan pages and rankings exploded. Your sitemap is lying to you. A SaaS docs site had 2,100 indexable URLs. The XML sitemap listed all of them, so everyone assumed they were fine. They w…
