Disclaimer
General information, written carefully — but not advice about your site, and not a promise about any outcome
This is general information, not advice about your site
Everything published here is written to be accurate and traceable to a primary source. None of it has been written after looking at your website.
Search problems are specific. The same symptom — traffic down, pages not indexed, rankings that never arrived — has several unrelated causes with unrelated remedies, and telling them apart requires your Search Console data, your analytics, a crawl of your site and often your server logs. A general explanation of a mechanism is a useful thing to hold while you diagnose. It is not a diagnosis, and applying a fix described here to a problem it was not written for can make a situation worse rather than better.
Search engines change, and so does this material
Ranking systems, crawler behavior, reporting tools and published documentation all change, sometimes with an announcement and often without one. Metrics are retired and replaced. Guidance that was correct when it was written can be superseded quietly.
Pages here cite primary sources so you can check the current position yourself, and that is the intended use: read the source, not only the summary. Where a linked document has changed since this site described it, the document governs. No page here is warranted to be current, complete, or applicable to your circumstances.
No outcome is promised
Nothing on this site promises or implies a ranking position, a level of traffic, a volume of inquiries or an amount of revenue — not on the service pages, not in the guides, and not in any conversation that follows from them. Nobody controls a ranking system they do not operate.
Google's own documentation on debugging traffic drops states that some changes take effect in a few days, others could take several months, and that there is no guarantee that changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results. That is the correct expectation to hold about search work generally, including mine, and it can be read on Google's own page on the subject.
Nothing here creates a relationship
Reading this site, or sending a message from the contact page, does not create a consulting engagement or any other professional relationship. An engagement begins when scope and terms have been agreed in writing, and not before. Until then, nothing published here should be relied on as though it were advice given to you.
Nothing on this site is legal advice or expert opinion in any matter. Where a question touches litigation, a conflict check comes first and any engagement is arranged separately.