seo
Don't hand-write a sitemap.xml, generate it from data you already have - 2026-09-05
A sitemap.xml just tells crawlers every URL on your site plus when it last changed, so they don't have to discover pages purely by following links. For a static site build script, there's no reason to maintain one by hand — it's a direct transformation of data the build already…
robots.txt for a small static site is basically a pointer to the sitemap - 2026-09-05
I'd assumed robots.txt needed some thought — which paths to block, which crawlers to allow or disallow. For a small public site with nothing private on it, it turns out to be three lines:
A schema.org Person block is what actually helps you rank for your own name - 2026-09-05
I wanted my TIL site to show up when someone searches my name, and went looking for an "SEO script" to do it. There isn't one — nothing you paste in makes a search engine rank you first. What actually helps is giving it structured, machine-readable proof of who a page belongs…
Verifying a GitHub Pages site with Bing Webmaster Tools (no DNS needed) - 2026-09-05
Bing Webmaster Tools also feeds DuckDuckGo and Yahoo results, so submitting a sitemap there covers more ground than just Google — worth doing once a sitemap already exists. The usual way to prove ownership of a site is a DNS TXT record, but that assumes you control the domain's…