Put your best foot forward with consistent data

Kaspar says: “My tip is about data consistency, which is a topic that is very close to my heart.”

How do you ensure data consistency in 2026?

“Some people may not consider this to be the most innovative or popular concept, and it’s certainly not a buzzword making the rounds nowadays.

However, data consistency differentiates the companies and brands that are really successful in competitive environments from those that try to catch onto the latest buzzword or bandwagon, promising a silver bullet in an industry where silver bullets are few and far between.

Data consistency is ensured when we make sure that all the data points towards the desired landing pages that we wish to be indexed, reindexed, and ranked within Google.

It's important to remind ourselves that Google is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, the dominant force in the industry. Particularly for those YMYL companies and companies that deal in retail, with Q4 coming up, it's not too late to work on that.

For these companies, it is most important that their websites, their stock, and their products get crawled and re-crawled on a regular basis, so they can put their best foot forward in order to generate relevant converting traffic – more than anything else.”

By data consistency, are you mainly referring to the consistency of your SEO signals, to ensure that different sources are saying the same thing?

“Among other things, yes, but we are talking about something that is rather holistic in nature.

When we talk about data consistency, you want to make sure that search engines (including Bing, but primarily Google) understand what you care about.

You want to make sure that your technical signals are consistent. You do not want to unintentionally mix up canonicals and noindex tags. You do not want to have noindexation creeping up from a staging server that was never supposed to be indexed in the first place. That's the technical part of the discussion.

Of course, there is on-page content, which is hugely consequential. A very good example here is expired content that is not available anymore, or content that implies the product is not available or sold out. ‘Sold out’ is the key phrase here. If you have variations of the terminology ‘sold out’, ‘unavailable’, or ‘out-of-stock’ on your retail platform, Google and Bing are likely to deduce that the product is not available.

That makes it a poor landing page, and these pages generally lose trust and visibility, which trickles down to the entire platform. These on-page content signals can drag the entirety of an otherwise very good website down.

That's of huge consequence in Q4, when you're making between 70% and 90% of your revenue for the entire year (as is the case in some retail industries).

On top of that, we have off-page. When I talk to clients, I often hear the notion that off-page isn't really important because it feels dated, and like the SEO of 2005-2010. It’s true that it’s very hard to make a website rank only by utilising backlinks, but backlinks can hold a website back. It is important to mitigate those risks that have come into existence over the years, without the current website operators and owners knowing about them.

That's what I'm referring to when I talk about the holistic approach. It's important to regularly check that these signals are consistent. We're just scratching the surface of a much bigger issue. There are so many technical and content signals. Don’t even get me started talking about international websites, where hreflang comes into play.

It is a hugely complex topic with a lot of moving parts that impact each other. The only solution to make sure that search engines understand your intention, in the way that you want, is to carry out regular audits – every 12 months or every 18 months, but certainly not less frequently than that.”

How do you identify negative on-page signals at scale, find the biggest issues, and prioritise what needs to be done first?

“The audit is a big part of that answer, which has become a bit bigger now because we're talking about beasts that are constantly changing. No website is static in nature (if nothing else, the content changes and the product changes), but there is more that can be done.

I'm a huge fan of saving and preserving server logs. It’s a pet project of mine. Only by saving and preserving server logs over an extended period of time can you be in a situation to consciously manage the crawl budget allocation.

You have to keep in mind that Google doesn't crawl every website over and over again. They have to manage their resources as well, so they allocate a certain amount of crawling to every website. Whether that amount is being expended on the blog or the product side of the website will have consequences for the revenue stream.

You want to make sure Googlebot focuses on what you care about most, and that can be actively managed if you have server log data at hand. This is something that can be done alongside planning those audits.

There is another point that is important to raise here. At times, clients will want to conduct audits in-house. If the expertise is there, that's fantastic. In my experience, however, it's difficult for an in-house team to take a cold, hard look at the baby that they work on every day. What are the vulnerabilities? What isn't working well? Are there legacy content and legacy signals that you need to deal with?

Simply put, they don't have the dispassionate approach that an external auditing agency brings to the table. Working together, hand in hand (in-house developers, in-house SEO, and an external party), brings the best possible results.

It’s not about pointing fingers. It’s about pointing out the things that they don't see, in the way that you don’t see flaws in their own children (who are, of course, perfect). That's the way people tend to see the website they work on.”

How do you decide what matters most, and how do you get Googlebot to focus primarily on that?

“For the vast majority of commercially-oriented websites out there, where a product is being sold, the product section is most important: the listings, and the individual product pages.

We're not going to get into a debate over which is more important. I still believe that both the overview and individual product pages are important and, ideally, you should have both crawled and indexed on a regular basis.

What matters are revenue-generating landing pages, rather than the noise around them – by which I mean the forums, blogs, customer relations, and event pages (unless you are in the event business). Sometimes that noise is SEO content, and sometimes it's legacy content from a project that was done a long time ago, and has been lingering ever since. That is much less of a priority in comparison to those product pages that can generate revenue.

The first step is to understand what kind of landing pages you have. Are they optimized? If you have achieved critical mass, that’s perfect. Does that translate to your sitemap? Often, the answer is no. There is rarely a 100% overlap, and the sitemap doesn't reflect what you want to have indexed.

Subsequently, you can actually look at what Google has been crawling over the last 6 to 12 months. If you don't have server logs, you can't really say that. If you do have those server logs (a beautiful thing to have), you can overlap the data and determine whether Google has been focussing on different sections of the website – maybe expired content or content that is not generating the same revenue as other content that is being neglected.

Then, it can be steered towards what you intend for Google to prioritise. It's not something that can be enforced, but it's certainly something that can be successfully stimulated.”

If backlinks are holding your website back, how do you identify which those are, and what do you do with them?

“There are backlinks that help promote the website, and there are backlinks that come into existence (intentionally or otherwise) that can actually hold the website back.

That's what the disavow tool is there for. I'm going to park the discussion about how long Google is going to keep the disavow tool in place because, for many years, the widespread opinion has been that it will be discontinued any day now. That very well could happen, but for the time being, it is there.

Therefore, it's possible to tell Google, ‘We have identified that volume of backlinks, and we really do not want to be connected to that dodgy area of the web.’ We’re talking about these old-school sites, directories, spammed forums, or even the red-light district of the web. If that's not the topic of your website, you don't want to have that kind of association.

Why these links come into existence and who created them isn't important, as far as Google is concerned. From a website operator's perspective, we have the means of telling Google, ‘Do not hold these links against us. We know they exist, but we don’t want to be associated with them anymore.’ That's a great way to mitigate those.

The whole process is rather complex in nature because it's important to grab as compelling a backlink sample as possible, depending on the backlink volume. If we’re talking about a couple of billion backlinks, that of course takes several weeks.

A good way to start is by pulling backlink samples from Google Search Console (who doesn’t love free-of-charge data?). Aggregate those and review them. That's another part of the process where an in-house team tends not to bring the kind of expertise to the table that's necessary.

We're not just talking about the type of backlinks and anchor text distribution; we're also reviewing the pages linking to us, what quality they represent, and whether they have open comment sections. If there are no open comments, that's a very strong signal that these pages are made for link purposes only. Do they randomly link to all the Viagras and cheap insurance places around the world? Again, that’s a very strong signal that these are made for link purposes only.

There is an art and a science to reviewing a backlink profile. It's a time-consuming process which the in-house team shouldn't be burdened with, because they have much bigger fish to fry, and they wouldn't be as efficient.

I do want to say, this is not a process that should be repeated on a monthly or even quarterly basis. Even for the largest websites out there, with the biggest backlink profiles, once every 12-18 months, as part of an audit, is perfectly fine.

Do not obsess about your backlinks. This is not a top priority. Technical and content signals are much more important, but this is still part of the conversation. When we talk about a holistic approach, links cannot be left out.”

How can you use AI as an optional efficiency tool while maintaining a human element?

“The efficiency increase can be tremendous. Software development/script development is a particularly good example, and that's how we use it.

We're able to provide simple solutions to complex problems much faster and much more efficiently. It's also more cost-effective, and it can be tested sooner – and, as we know, sooner is better on the web.

There are huge advantages that AI can bring, depending on the individual context and the individual website.

Where I am very cautious about applying AI is for content generation. I have yet to see impressive results. Most of the time, the content falls short of expectations. More often than not, websites that choose to throw overboard everything they've been doing for decades (even getting rid of evergreen content that has been manually edited and replacing it with the new shiny thing called ‘AI content generation’) tend to regret that.

They tend to subsequently seek assistance because their content quality signals are bound to drop very badly.”

Kaspar, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Don't jump on the new shiny thing. Consistency and a long-term perspective are what's going to help you not just survive but thrive in the most competitive SEO environment.

If you happen to be one of those sites where the competition is fierce, focus on what you can do, focus on your clients, and make sure your signals are consistent.

Do not lose any sleep over the latest buzzwords in the industry; it's better if your competitors do that.”

Kaspar Symanski is Senior Director at SearchBrothers. Find out more over at SearchBrothers.com.