About me
I live in the gap between what a page says and what a search engine thinks it says. That gap is almost always bigger than people expect, and closing it is most of what I do.
I came to SEO from reading, not from marketing. I wanted to understand why some pages survive for years and others disappear after a month, and the answer turned out to be less about tricks and more about structure.
What I work on
Most of my work is diagnosing: crawl budget issues, canonicalization problems, content that ranks for the wrong thing, pages that get indexed when they should not and pages that do not get indexed when they should. The visible symptom is usually traffic. The actual cause is usually somewhere in how the site is built.
I also do content architecture: figuring out which topics a site should own, how to organize them so that related pages reinforce each other, and where there are gaps that would be cheap to fill.
The technical and the editorial are not separate in my work. A well-structured page with thin content still fails. Excellent writing on a misconfigured site still fails.
How I think
I work backward from the query. Before I look at a page, I try to understand what a person actually wants when they type a particular phrase. Not what the page wants to say, but what the reader is looking for at that specific moment. Then I check whether the page answers it.
I distrust most SEO rules of thumb. The web changes, search engine behavior changes, and most guidelines were written for a configuration that no longer exists. I would rather look at what is actually happening in the data than follow advice that was current three years ago.
Things I’m into
I find the history of search more interesting than most people do. The early days of keyword stuffing and link farms are not just funny artifacts. They are a record of what happens when people figure out the rules of a system and optimize against the spirit of it.
I also read a lot about how people navigate information spaces in general: libraries, archives, taxonomies. The problems are older than Google.
A small thing about me
I have a text file where I track search queries that I find genuinely strange, the ones where it is completely unclear what the person wanted. I do not do anything with it. I just add to it when I find one that surprises me.