Insights, Tutorials & Best Practices

Technical SEO

How to find backlinks in Google Analytics 4 (it only shows the clicked ones)

GA4 has no backlink report. It counts referral sessions - visits that arrived from a link somebody clicked - so a removed link and an unclicked link produce the same empty row. The current click-path, why the referring URL arrives stripped to a domain, and the six blind spots.

Andrei

Sep 11, 2026 • 12 min

Technical SEO

How to check a backlink in Google search (we ran all four ways)

link:linkguard.ai returns 73 million results and not one backlink. What the retired operator, a quoted search, the page's own HTML and Search Console each actually prove.

Andrei

Aug 22, 2026 • 9 min

Technical SEO

Two schema validators, two verdicts: which one decides your rich result

The same page passes schema.org's validator with three items and no warnings, and Google's Rich Results Test with two. Nothing errored. One item is simply absent. Both tools are Google's, both are right, and only one of them is telling you what Google will actually show. Run on our own page, on 14 August 2026.

Andrei

Aug 14, 2026 • 9 min

Technical SEO

How to trace a redirect chain on a link you don't control

The page loads, your anchor is there, everything looks fine - and that check tells you less than it feels like it does. A bought link can arrive through hops someone else added after your money cleared. How to read the hop path on a link you don't control, and where a plain HTTP trace runs out of road.

Andrei

Aug 02, 2026 • 9 min

Technical SEO

How to find the outbound links on your own pages

Almost nobody audits the links leaving their own site, so the list quietly grows: an old resource roundup, a plugin's footer credit, an embedded feed. Then a domain changes hands and your page is recommending something you have never seen. Four ways to pull the list, and what no automated pass catches.

Andrei

Aug 02, 2026 • 7 min

Technical SEO

What is Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) — and does it do anything for SEO?

Google shipped the Open Knowledge Format in June 2026 and the AEO crowd immediately called it the next way to get cited by AI. Here's what OKF actually is, who Google really built it for, and the part the hype skips: nothing on the public web reads these files yet. An honest, date-stamped guide from a team that builds AI-readable files for a living.

Andrei

Jun 22, 2026 • 11 min

Technical SEO

Should you block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended?

There's a robots.txt snippet doing the rounds that 'blocks all AI.' Paste it without understanding it and you can quietly delete yourself from the AI answers you actually wanted to be in. Here's what each AI crawler really does — training vs retrieval vs search — and the honest tradeoff, with copy-paste directives that are correct as of June 2026.

Andrei

Jun 20, 2026 • 11 min

Technical SEO

What is llms.txt — and does your site actually need one?

llms.txt is a tidy little file that's supposed to help AI tools read your site. Here's what it actually is, what the spec says, and the uncomfortable part the hype skips: as of mid-2026, the data shows almost nobody's AI is reading it. An honest guide from a team that built a generator for it.

Andrei

Jun 20, 2026 • 10 min

Technical SEO

Redirect chains explained: what they are, why they hurt SEO, and how to fix them

Redirect chains rarely break anything loudly — they waste crawl budget, slow every load, and stall indexing. What 301/302/307/308 mean, the real harm, and how to collapse a chain to one hop.

Andrei

May 29, 2026 • 12 min