A plain-language guide to technical SEO
Before a search engine reads a word of your writing, it meets your site’s plan: its addresses, its register of pages, its boundaries and its forwarding notes. This guide walks through each one using Google’s own documentation, and borrows its frame from Adelaide, a city whose town acres were surveyed and numbered before anyone chose or bid for them.
A guide to how search reads a site. The six sheets below are the reading.
Readable addresses, folders that group like with like, and links a crawler can follow. The grid itself.
The register of every acre you want found: what a sitemap does, what it can’t promise, and its limits.
Where crawlers may walk, and why a fence is not a curtain: robots.txt against noindex.
One acre, many addresses: how Google picks a canonical URL, and the signals you can send.
Google surveys the mobile version of a page. What has to match, and what quietly goes missing.
Renaming the streets without losing the town: URL maps, redirect types and timing.
Why a surveyor’s plan
In 1837, South Australia’s Surveyor-General, Colonel William Light, laid out a plan of Adelaide that divided the city land into 1,042 town acres: 700 in South Adelaide, and 342 in North Adelaide. Those who had bought land in advance chose their town acres on 23 March 1837, and the rest were auctioned four days later.
Around the city, Light’s design set a ring of open ground. The City of Adelaide describes the Park Lands as embracing the city “in a leafy figure of eight”, and notes that the Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout were added to the National Heritage List in 2008. The main square at the heart of the city is Victoria Square/Tarntanyangga, a Kaurna name meaning Red kangaroo dreaming, and the river is the River Torrens/Karrawirra Parri, from the Kaurna for Redgum forest.
That is the useful idea for a website. A good site is planned the same way: each page has one clear address, the addresses follow a pattern a stranger can read, the main routes connect every part, and the edges are drawn on purpose. When the plan changes, the old addresses are told where the new ones are. The rest of this guide is that idea, one sheet at a time.
Field notes
A robots.txt file “is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google.” To keep a page out, Google points to noindex or password protection.
Submitting a sitemap “is merely a hint”: it doesn’t guarantee Google will download it or use it for crawling.
A canonical preference is “a hint, not a rule”. Google may choose a different page than you do.
Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking.
301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.
After a move, keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year.
About this guide
This is a reading guide for anyone who looks after a website: an owner, a writer, a developer, or someone about to brief an agency and wanting to understand the words in the brief. It covers the technical layer only, the part that decides whether search engines can find, read and correctly file your pages.
It does no SEO work, so there are no case studies or results here. Every example site and address in the sheets is invented (they use example.com-style addresses), and every rule is taken from Google’s own documentation, linked beside the claim and at the foot of each page.
If you want to start somewhere, start with site structure: most of the other sheets are about keeping that plan honest.