Answers, not content marketing
SEO problems, and what actually fixes them
Every post here is written to answer one question that people type into a search box, in the first paragraph, before any of the reasoning. If the answer is that you do not need to buy anything, the post says that. We would rather be the page you found useful at two in the morning than the page you closed after three scrolls of preamble.
Working out what is wrong
- Why is my website not ranking on Google? Almost always one of five things: the page is not indexed, the page does not match the intent behind the query, the site has no authority for the topic, something technical is blocking the crawler, or the page is too new. They are worth checking in that order, because four of them are free to check and only the third one costs money to fix.
- How long does SEO take to work? Technical fixes can move rankings in days. Content on an established site usually takes six to twelve weeks. A new domain competing for commercial terms takes six to twelve months, and no amount of budget compresses that to zero, because part of what is being measured is time.
- How do I check whether Google has indexed my site? Search site:yourdomain.com for a rough count, then use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console for the truth about any single page. If a page is not indexed, the Page Indexing report tells you which of about a dozen reasons applies, and most of them you can fix yourself in an afternoon.
Links and authority
- How many backlinks do I need to rank? There is no universal number. The usable answer comes from the results page you want to be on: look at the referring domain counts of the pages currently ranking three to seven, and treat the median as your target. For most small business terms that is somewhere between fifteen and sixty referring domains, not thousands of links.
- What makes a backlink toxic, and should you disavow it? A link is a problem when it was placed to manipulate rankings and it is part of a pattern: paid do-follow links at volume, links from sites that exist to sell them, site-wide footer links, or exact-match anchors far outside a natural distribution. Google ignores most bad links on its own, so the disavow file is for two situations only: a manual action, or links you or somebody you paid actually built.