AI-generated picture of a website fighting a windmill with a G on it

Driven by a desire to learn more about the arcane arts of SEO and a prophecy exhorting me to establish this blog phylactery as the definitive herald for my name in Google’s search results, I embarked on a quest.

A long, long time ago 1, in a galaxy far, far away, the first few results were of my LinkedIn account and some dormant social media accounts that I rarely used or frequented. The cached results were old and outdated, beguiling hapless searchers with their misleading guise, sounding a false echo from bygone days. With the help of my familiar, we sculpted the shell of the phylactery on May 12 and launched it. It was met with naught but crickets.

AI-generated picture of cricket knights at a round table with a website

I had no followers, no audience, and no one to share it with. Moreover, the content of that post was personal and not exactly riveting, and I did not feel comfortable just scattering wisps of my Horcrux upon the digital winds. I decided to take a more “organic” approach and just add links to and from the template powering this soul shard 2. Over the course of the next couple of days, I continued by dusting off those moth-bitten tomes of social spells and inscribing them with runes of return that led back here. Pages were also added and rewritten in my burgeoning chronicles as I revised and improved my writing lore-making. After about 7 days, I was able to get the first post to rank on the first page of results! A most auspicious sign!

In tandem with this “strategy” 3, I had also read that making the page fast would help with SEO, so I spent some time with my digital familiar fixing issues decried by the inscrutable oracle, known only by the symbol Ψ 4. Given that this phylactery was hosted securely stowed in the mighty buttressed towers of Cloudflare, and utilized Astro’s cantrips of static generation, the initial score without any intervention was already decent (80+ on mobile and 90+ on desktop). I layered further enchantments upon my phylactery, including:

  • Preloading fonts.
  • Enabling certain cloudflare settings for caching 5.
  • Resizing images and converting to “next-gen” webp format.

The true potency of these enchantments upon my standing in the great Google ledger is murky, but the oracle always demanded sacrifices before a noble conquest. While this was happening, I noticed that the search results indicated that I had neglected to update my favicon sigil 6, which still bore the mundane mark of its Astro lineage. This oversight was swiftly mended.

Fate, the mercurial mistress, had other plans in store. At roughly the same time of my true branding of the sigil, my banner was abruptly cast from its rightful place on the first page! This banishment demanded investigation. Had I unknowingly violated some ancient SEO covenant? My only other action around the same time was the addition of the book notes post which includes an image of the book cover 7. Despite my best efforts at scrying, I failed to ascertain whether it was the sigil change, the addition of the blasphemous image, or something else entirely that caused this travesty. Could this graven image have triggered the baleful eye of the copyright sentinels? A perplexing riddle indeed!

Careful reconnaissance of the digital wilds led to a welcome rumour: a cabal of turncoats actively working from within Google’s ranks to divulge their secrets! Would they be the key to uncovering the conspiracy behind this injustice? I sought to find out more.

A series of secret handshakes and esoteric signs 8 later, they admitted me into their outer ranks and bade me patience, promising a report of their investigations. This turn of events left me anxious to ponder what tidings these findings would portend.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this saga when we enter the lair of the beast and see what evil machinations are in store for us!

Footnotes

  1. Prior to May 12, 2025. ↩

  2. Praying, perchance, that House Github would lend its gravitas to my cause. ↩

  3. which doesn’t really mean much when you have only a few social accounts and a blog with only a few posts. ↩

  4. Psi, aka PageSpeed Insights ↩

  5. Under Speed > Optimization. ↩

  6. The tiny symbol of my phylactery in browser tabs for the non-web developer folks reading this. ↩

  7. self-hosted to avoid hot-linking. ↩

  8. It was a mostly automated process to authorize Google to access DNS records on Cloudflare. ↩