The SEO Loop blog

Technical SEO

Technical SEO guides from SEO Loop: practical, tested and free of fluff.

Latest

Core Web Vitals explained: LCP, INP, CLS

What LCP, INP and CLS measure, the thresholds that count as good, lab vs real-user data, and the fixes that usually move the numbers.

Technical SEO · · 2 min read
Technical SEO · 2 min read

How to check a sitemap: find, read, validate

Find any site's XML sitemap, check it follows the rules, and fix the problems that stop Google using it, from wrong URLs to size limits.

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Technical SEO · 3 min read

How to check a canonical tag (3 ways)

Three quick ways to see which canonical URL a page declares, what Google actually chose, and the canonical mistakes that quietly split your rankings.

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Technical SEO · 2 min read

How to check if a page is noindex

Three places a noindex directive hides (HTML, HTTP headers and JavaScript), how to find it fast, and why pages go noindex by accident after launch.

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Technical SEO · 3 min read

How to check robots.txt and test a URL

Find a site's robots.txt, read the rules correctly, test whether a URL is blocked, and fix the mistakes that hide whole sections from Google.

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Technical SEO · 2 min read

How to check schema markup on any page

See which structured data a page declares, validate it with free tools, and fix the missing properties that stop a page earning rich results.

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Technical SEO · 2 min read

301 vs 302 redirects and redirect chains

When to use a 301 or a 302, why redirect chains and loops quietly hurt crawling and speed, and how to trace a redirect path from the command line.

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Technical SEO · 3 min read

robots.txt vs noindex vs canonical

robots.txt, noindex and canonical all seem to hide a page, but do very different things. When to use each, and the mistake that makes noindex fail.

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Technical SEO · 2 min read

Structured data and JSON-LD for beginners

What structured data is, why JSON-LD is the format to use, which schema types are worth adding first, and how to test that search engines can read your markup.

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Technical SEO · 3 min read

What is crawl budget, and does it matter?

Crawl budget explained without the myths: who needs to worry about it, what wastes it, and how to check whether Google is crawling your site well.

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