seo-review

SEO Review

Find and fix the technical reasons a site is not being found, by search engines and by AI answer engines. Diagnose against the live site first, fix in code second, verify in the build output third.

Core principle

Never trust the source. Verify what is actually served.

Almost every defect this skill is built from was invisible in code and obvious in curl output or in built HTML. Read source to understand intent. Verify against the live site and the build to find bugs.

Instructions

Work the four phases in order. Do not skip ahead to code: domain-level problems invalidate everything downstream, and reporting a canonical fix while the domain still redirects wrongly wastes the user's time.

Phase 1 — Interrogate the live site

Run before reading any source.

# Which host actually serves? Follow nothing.
curl -sI https://example.com/ | grep -iE "HTTP/|location"
curl -sI https://www.example.com/ | grep -iE "HTTP/|location"

# Does a deep path keep its path, or collapse to the homepage?
curl -sI https://www.example.com/blog/a-post | grep -iE "HTTP/|location"

# robots and sitemap must be 200 on the SERVING host, not redirects
curl -sIL https://example.com/robots.txt | grep -iE "HTTP/|content-type"
curl -sIL https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -iE "HTTP/|content-type"

# Do canonicals agree with the host serving them?
for p in / /about /blog /pricing; do
  printf "%-20s " "$p"
  curl -s "https://example.com$p" | grep -o '<link rel="canonical" href="[^"]*"' | sed 's/.*href="//;s/"//'
done

# Titles, descriptions, structured data
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -oE '<title>[^<]*</title>|<meta name="description"[^>]*>'
curl -s https://example.com/blog/a-post | grep -o '"@type":"[^"]*"'

Check the www/apex relationship first. The highest-impact bug, and common: the apex redirects to www (or the reverse) while every canonical, sitemap URL and JSON-LD url points at the other one. The crawled page says "my canonical is X", and X redirects straight back. Also confirm the status is 308/301 and not 307/302 (temporary redirects do not consolidate ranking signals), and that it preserves the path.