Technical SEO (still) doesn't matter

Yesterday, I showed you a blog that I wrote that’s driven nearly 300,000 clicks in the last 14ish months.

There’s one hilarious detail that I left out.

We hardly spent any time on technical SEO for that brand.

In fact, their Ahrefs Health Score is the lowest I’ve ever seen.

1 out of 100.

Lol.

This would send most SEOs into a spiral.

And yet, I ignore every single email that Ahrefs sends me about it.

I simply don’t care.

Here’s why — the pages index as we intend them to and their traffic graph continues to grow up and to the right.

But seriously.

First off, the Ahrefs Health Score doesn’t tell the full story of a site’s technical SEO — you should know that.

Many of our brands score in the 60-80 range and continue to have success.

Second, this particular Health Score is so low because there are 1 million 404 errors on the site.

That is not an exaggeration, there are over 1,000,000 broken links on the site.

1 million.

Why? Because of the brand’s business model.

Their products are handmade, truly one of one.

So when product A gets sold, nobody else on the planet can purchase product B, because there is no more of product A. There was only one ever made.

Once product A is sold, the product URL automatically becomes archived.

We tried to set up an automated 301 redirect to the parent collection once the URL is archived, but we couldn’t get it to work.

So we gave up.

And quite frankly, I’m glad we couldn’t get it to work.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that some URLs are fine to simply end in a 404.

None of those product URLs are ever coming back, so they quite literally fit the 404 description: "Page Not Found.”

So the next time someone tries to sell you on technical SEO, tell them to kick rocks.

It’s not nearly as important as you think.

We spend less than an hour on our tech audit & implementation for our agency brands.

We follow a very simple framework, you can get access to it here.

Kai