Insights, Tutorials & Best Practices

SEO Strategies

Semrush backlink audit: what it checks, and how to run one without Semrush

Semrush's Backlink Audit gives every referring domain a toxicity score and a one-click disavow file. Useful — but it's a paid, point-in-time cleanup. Here's what it checks, how to run the same audit free with Google Search Console, and the ongoing job an audit doesn't cover.

Andrei

Jun 01, 2026 • 9 min

SEO Strategies

State of AI crawler blocking 2026: we checked 123 sites' robots.txt

We ran 123 well-known sites' robots.txt through our own matcher. The headline isn't a single number — it's the split: news publishers block AI crawlers at 90%, developer sites at 0%.

Andrei

May 31, 2026 • 5 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

Link Building

Dofollow vs nofollow links: what they are and when each matters

A nofollow link won't pass ranking credit like a regular link does, but calling it worthless is wrong. What dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and ugc do, and how to check any link in seconds.

Andrei

May 29, 2026 • 10 min

Checklists

Quarterly backlink audit checklist for agencies: 40 items for 2026

Browser-saved 40-item quarterly backlink audit checklist for agencies — lost-link recovery (18-26% conversion vs 8.5% cold outreach), donor-health degradation tracking, anchor portfolio drift detection, disavow review (sparingly per Mueller / Illyes / Gabe), and reporting that survives a CFO review.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 40 min

Checklists

On-page SEO optimization checklist: 35 items for the 2026 audit

Browser-saved 35-item on-page SEO audit for 2026 — title-H1 coherence (the lever that drops Google's title-rewrite rate from 76% to 20%), self-canonical + noindex checks, post-HCU content quality, AI-extraction structure, internal-link anchor variety.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 39 min

Checklists

Site migration SEO checklist: 37 items for surviving a 2026 domain move

Browser-saved 37-item checklist for surviving a domain change or replatform in 2026 — pre-migration content cull, 1:1 redirect mapping, indexability on the new domain, day-zero launch verification, AI-surface continuity, and anti-patterns that still tank migrations.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 45 min

Checklists

Technical SEO checklist before site launch: 36 items for a clean 2026 go-live

Browser-saved 36-item checklist for going live in 2026 — indexability staging-leaks, canonicals, Core Web Vitals field-data targets, entity-signal schema, and four anti-patterns being sold as pre-launch SEO that don't survive scrutiny against 2025-2026 data.

Andrei

May 27, 2026 • 42 min

Checklists

AI Overviews + GEO readiness checklist: what 2026 data shows

Browser-saved 22-item checklist for getting cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Built on Ahrefs' 75K-brand correlation study, Princeton's GEO paper, BrightEdge AIO data, and Profound's citation audits.

Andrei

May 26, 2026 • 21 min