Technical SEO Setup

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else builds on. Without it, content quality and keyword targeting don't matter because Google can't find your pages (no sitemap), is told not to crawl them (bad robots.txt), can't understand them (no structured data), or displays them badly (missing meta). The skill is honest about scope up front: it builds the foundation that makes a site eligible to rank — it doesn't, by itself, make a site rank. That needs content and links too.

Two questions get answered before any file is generated. First: what's the rendering mode? If the site is client-side-only, Google may be indexing an empty shell and no sitemap fixes that — SSG, SSR, or a prerender step has to happen first. Second: does any SEO infrastructure already exist? If Yoast or a framework is already emitting the sitemap and meta, the skill audits and fills gaps instead of clobbering it with a second competing sitemap. A hand-rolled file fighting Yoast is worse than the gap you were trying to close.

Host and URL-form normalisation is the single most common technical SEO defect — the same page reachable at multiple URLs, splitting its ranking signals. The skill checks www vs apex, trailing slash vs no slash, and http → https as a deliberate step, not a footnote. Then sitemaps, canonicals, and internal links are all forced to agree on the chosen form. Schema is emitted as the most specific subtype available (Plumber, not bare LocalBusiness), routed through the framework's metadata API rather than pasted as raw HTML, and validated against the Google Rich Results Test before delivery.

A few things it refuses outright. Cloaking — serving different content to Googlebot than to users — is a core spam-policy violation and gets denied even when asked for. Indexing private surfaces (auth, dashboards, checkout) stays excluded from the sitemap and is Disallow/noindex'd even if the user says "index everything for maximum pages". And it never blocks CSS or JS in robots.txt, because Google needs them to render. Delivering the compliant setup over the requested harmful one is the job, not a refusal of it.