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Technical SEO Improvements for scripts.lukeleigh.com

Technical SEO Improvements for scripts.lukeleigh.com

Checklist Summary

| Item | Before | After | Notes | | — | — | — | — | | Robots.txt | Allowed all crawling without sitemap guarantee | Explicitly allows crawling, references sitemap | Updated robots.txt to match Google guidance. | | Sitemap | Plugin enabled but unchecked | jekyll-sitemap confirmed and validated in CI | seo-checks.rb fails build if sitemap missing. | | Titles & Descriptions | Several navigation pages used lowercase titles shared with H1 | Descriptive titles with separate navigation labels and headings | Added nav_title/heading to avoid nav regressions while improving SEO titles. | | Canonical Tags | Managed by jekyll-seo-tag without verification | Local HTTP validation for every canonical URL | build/seo-checks.rb serves _site locally and checks for HTTP 200. | | Status Codes | Manual spot checks only | Automated crawl of built site | CI runs Lychee plus canonical validation and records results in seo-checks.json. | | Structured Data | WebSite markup emitted but missing organization context | WebSite + Organization + BlogPosting JSON-LD with accurate profile data | Added organization metadata and live search target URL. | | Performance Hints | No resource preloads or asset sizing | Preload hero CSS/image, logo sized, lazy loading applied | Reduces layout shift and speeds first render. |

Discovery & Crawlability

  • robots.txt now follows Google’s recommended syntax and advertises https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/sitemap.xml.
  • jekyll-sitemap remains enabled; CI verifies _site/sitemap.xml is generated and extracts 834 canonical URLs.
  • Added a reusable build/seo-checks.rb script that spins up a local WEBrick server to confirm all canonical URLs resolve with HTTP 200 and that no meta refresh directives ship.

Indexability & Rendering

  • Navigation and landing pages received descriptive titles (PowerShell Scripts | Maintenance Scripts, etc.) plus dedicated heading/nav_title front matter so templates keep short labels.
  • 404 page and private HTML embeds (assets/*Home.html) set robots: noindex to prevent soft-404s in search results.
  • Template page _pages/content/New-Topic.md is unpublished and excluded from the sitemap.
  • Updated _includes/head.html to preload the primary stylesheet and hero teasers when available.

Structured Data Coverage

  • _includes/structured-data.html now receives organization details from _config.yml, enabling both WebSite and Organization JSON-LD. Posts continue to emit BlogPosting entities.
  • Configured search_url to point at a Google site search query so the SearchAction target is valid.

Pages with Adjusted Indexing

| URL | Action | Reason | | — | — | — | | /404.html | noindex,follow | Avoid indexing error page. | | /assets/KarenHome.html | noindex,nofollow | Embedded Google Map not intended for search. | | /assets/LukeHome.html | noindex,nofollow | Embedded Google Map not intended for search. | | /assets/MarkHome.html | noindex,nofollow | Embedded Google Map not intended for search. | | _pages/content/New-Topic.md | published: false, noindex | Editorial template only. |

The sitemap continues to list canonical, indexable URLs only (834 entries in the latest build).

Internal Linking & URL Hygiene

  • Sidebar navigation now prefers nav_title values so we can use richer document titles without bloating anchor text.
  • All automatically generated links run through relative_url to avoid protocol or host mismatches.

Automation & CI

  • .github/workflows/jekyll-build.yml now instructs Lychee to output JSON, runs bundle exec ruby build/seo-checks.rb, and uploads both lychee-report.json and seo-checks.json artifacts for review.
  • build/seo-checks.rb records sitemap presence, canonical status codes, meta robot rules, and any warnings in machine-readable form. Run locally with: 
    bundle exec jekyll build --future
bundle exec ruby build/seo-checks.rb
cat seo-checks.json

Remaining Follow-Ups

  • Many legacy posts rely on automatically generated excerpts for descriptions. They render well, but adding hand-written summaries would further improve CTR.
  • Large hero media (GIF/MP4) could be compressed in a future pass to shave additional kilobytes.

Google Search Console Recommendations

  1. Verify the property for https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/ (Domain property if available).
  2. Navigate to Index → Sitemaps and submit https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/sitemap.xml. Confirm Google reports the submission as “Success”.
  3. Use URL Inspection on key templates:
    • https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/
    • https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/menu/_pages/scripts.html
    • https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/scripts/active-directory-information/ (sample post)
  4. For each, click View Crawled Page to confirm Google sees the canonical you expect and that structured data is detected.
  5. Spot-check https://scripts.lukeleigh.com/404.html to ensure Search Console confirms the noindex directive.

Validation Snapshot

  • Latest local run: 834 URLs in sitemap, 832 HTML documents scanned, 0 canonical HTTP errors, and 0 unexpected noindex pages (see seo-checks.json).
  • CI artifacts seo-reports/seo-checks.json and seo-reports/lychee-report.json retain machine-readable outputs for each build.