Reading recommendations

Recommendations lists the change worth making on each page — and keeps the verdict afterwards, including the ones that did not help.

Filter by brand, by status — Open, Applied, Measured, Dismissed — and by kind of finding.

Three kinds of finding

• title & description — the page ranks and is not clicked, and its title and description never say the words people search for.
• what the page opens with — the page's opening prose never mentions what it is found for. The search engine writes its own snippet from what a visitor sees first, and uses that before your description.
• not indexed — Google is not indexing the page. The card carries Google's own label, as it appears in Search Console's Page indexing report.

Where each one stands

Every card says, in one line:

• not yet applied
• pull request open — waiting for the merge, or edge rewrite set — waiting to be seen live — the change is on its way
• applied — verdict due, followed by the date — being measured
• measured as an improvement, measured, and it did not help, measured, and it did worse, or not enough evidence to say
• dismissed

A verdict is said plainly. Its whole value is that it can be unflattering.

Opening one

An open card shows:

• the impressions, clicks and position behind the finding, and why it is a finding rather than noise;
• the words the title and description never say, and the searches they come from;
• the title today, and a suggested replacement written to fit what Google shows — about 60 characters of title and 158 of description;
• once applied, when readers first saw it and when the verdict is due. The 28 days count from when the change is live for readers, not from when you pressed the button, and nothing else should change on the page until it is measured.