Technical SEO on complex websites
Why technical SEO stops being a checklist on large sites, and how to treat it as one system instead.
Also in Technical SEO
Enterprise SEO
At scale, SEO is a governance problem.
Writing on how technical foundations, content strategy, and organizational alignment hold together on large, complex websites where twelve teams can break what one team builds.
2 posts, newest
Repeatable SEO systems for site launches
One reusable SEO system for several enterprise launches: shared templates, the launch checklists, and why devs and PMs came first.
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More on enterprise SEO, newest first.
More to read nearby
Enterprise SEO has 2 posts so far. Technical SEO shares 2 of them and has 6 posts.
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Personal audit: where AI output fails
Nine things that broke on three reference sites I built fast with AI, ranked by severity, and the rules that stopped them repeating.
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SEO strategy vs SEO systems
Strategy decides what to build; systems decide whether it holds together as the site grows. The two side by side.
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What technical SEO is for: clarity
Technical SEO answers three questions for crawlers and people: what a page is about, how it relates, and why it exists.
Which launch checks this site enforces, and which still need me
The pre-launch and post-launch checklists from my launch post, run on this site: each line beside the check that enforces it, or the person who still has to.
Before launch
- URL structure and redirects reviewedEvery old address has to reach a real page in one hop Checked every build
- Template behavior validatedEvery page opened at five screen widths, from 320 to 2,560 pixels Checked before a merge to production
- Indexing and crawl controls confirmedrobots.txt can't block a search or AI crawler Checked every build
- Pagination and filtering testedDoesn't apply: no paged lists or filters on this site
- Internal linking checked at scaleEvery internal link has to land on a real page, never on a redirect Checked every build
- Sitemaps validatedThe sitemap has to list exactly the pages that exist Checked every build
- Metadata rules spot-checkedEvery title and description, on every page: length, no repeats, no leftover code Checked every build
- Kept eyes on production stuffA human read: after each production merge, the live check and the changed pages loaded on the live site
After launch
- Crawl and indexation monitoredA human read, in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
- 404s and broken links reviewedEvery old address has to keep its redirect in the published rules Checked every build
- Robots.txt and indexing rules checkedA noindex left over from before launch never goes live Checked every build
- Canonical behavior spot-checkedEvery canonical has to be the page's own address Checked every build
- Pagination and filters observedDoesn't apply: no paged lists or filters on this site
- Sitemaps checkedA page that changed without its sitemap date moving never goes live Checked every build
- Internal linking reviewedA page no other page points to never goes live Checked every build
- Performance and page speed monitoredA page over its weight budget for code and styles fails Checked before a merge to production
- Search visibility trackedA human read, on the public dashboard at /stats/
Caught before it goes liveA human readDoesn't apply here
Twelve of the 17 lines are caught before anything goes live; three still need a person; two can't happen on this site.
Checklist lines read from the post at build time; each check is named by its file and must be one the build runs.
Why enterprise SEO stalls when twelve teams touch one site
On a small site, one person can control the architecture, the content, the templates, and the deployment. On an enterprise site, twelve teams can break what one team builds.
Enterprise SEO fails when leadership expectations are misaligned with how decisions actually get made inside the organization.
From the Enterprise SEO page on the old version of this site, first published January 2026.
More on SEO at enterprise scale
The posts here cover launches. The rest of how I work on big sites lives on my full-time job page: