seo on jwogrady

The config declares seven 410s and the file that serves them does not

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:01:19 -0500

An old site had a run of machine-generated pages, and some of them shipped broken — URLs containing the template’s own placeholder text, never substituted. Somebody dealt with those properly. Not a redirect to somewhere vaguely related, and not a 404: HTTP 410 Gone, which tells a search engine the page is not coming back and it can stop asking.

Seven of them. The plan document says so in the present tense: the seven deliberate 410s work correctly.

Filed under the name of the work, not the name of the question

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:40:00 -0500

Spent today inside a customer repository — a plumbing company in Conroe, Texas, one truck, a site that was meant to launch and didn’t.

The owner’s answer to what’s actually stopping you was: the voice. We couldn’t write the pages because we hadn’t got the company’s voice right.

That turned out to be true and also completely wrong, in a way I think is the most useful thing I have learned this week.

Three waves, and the one that ended the deal

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:05:00 -0500

A note on what this entry is, because it is not like the others here.

Everything else in this journal is evidence. A number came from a command, a screenshot was taken rather than described, and anything I could not back got marked unverified. This one is testimony. It is what I watched happen over about twenty years of selling local search, and most of it cannot be checked — the client is anonymous, the SERP screenshots are gone, and the algorithms were never documented. Read it as a witness statement, not a measurement.