Techniques
Named practices for making a website perform better in search, AI assistants, and conversion - plus the shady ones you will meet whether you use them or not. Where Silktide's checks tell you what is wrong, these tell you what to do.
Endorsement levels
Every technique carries an endorsement level:
- Recommended - honest, effective, do it.
- Situational - legitimate, but only worthwhile in the circumstances the page describes.
- Discouraged - the risks outweigh the benefit.
- Deceptive - dishonest by construction. We document these because you will encounter them - sometimes aimed at you - and every one explains how to recognize it.
All techniques
| Title | Summary | Endorsement |
|---|---|---|
| Affiliate and sponsored placements | Pay for disclosed placement on review sites, affiliate publishers, and sponsored content - legal when honest, rented when the invoice stops. | Situational |
| AI crawler access policy | Decide deliberately which AI crawlers may fetch your site - training bots, search bots, and user-triggered fetchers are not the same thing. | Situational |
| Answer-first page structure | State the answer at the top and structure every section so it survives being quoted on its own. | Recommended |
| Astroturf review sites | Building or funding "independent" review sites that exist to endorse you. | Deceptive |
| Author pages and bylines | Put a real, verifiable person behind editorial content - a byline, an author page, and Person markup that links to their profiles. | Recommended |
| Community seeding | Planting promotional threads or comments in forums and Reddit to look like organic peer advice - usually against platform rules and often deceptive when undisclosed. | Discouraged |
| Comparison pages | Publish honest comparisons of your product against alternatives, on your own domain. | Recommended |
| Content readable without JavaScript | Deliver your page's text in the HTML the server sends, so AI crawlers that never run JavaScript can still read and cite it. | Recommended |
| Credible proof on conversion pages | Place specific, attributable social proof next to the decision - named customers, sourced ratings, guarantees you honor - not anonymous praise or logo walls without context. | Recommended |
| Digital PR | Earn genuine third-party coverage - data pitches, expert commentary, journalist outreach - so independent sources talk about you. | Recommended |
| Fake and incentivized reviews | Buying, gating, or fabricating consumer reviews - and why platforms, the FTC, and AI assistants punish it. | Deceptive |
| Guest-post link schemes | Buying or trading thin contributed posts mainly to gain followable links - a link-spam pattern Google documents and often devalues. | Discouraged |
| Internal linking for topical authority | Connect related pages with clear, descriptive links so crawlers and assistants can find, understand, and trust your best content on a topic. | Recommended |
| llms.txt | A curated Markdown index at /llms.txt for AI tools - cheap to add, useful for some agents, not a Google ranking lever. | Situational |
| Local SEO and Google Business Profile | For businesses with a real location or service area, keep NAP consistent, complete the Google Business Profile, and declare LocalBusiness markup that matches what people see. | Recommended |
| Machine-readable dates | Declare when every substantial page was published and last updated, in metadata machines can read. | Recommended |
| Organization identity markup | Declare one canonical Organization (and WebSite) entity with logo, URL, and sameAs links so engines can tell who you are. | Recommended |
| Original research and statistics | Publish data only you have - surveys, benchmarks, measurements - so others must cite you, and structure it so assistants can lift the figures accurately. | Recommended |
| Page speed and Core Web Vitals | Make important pages load and respond quickly enough that visitors stay and search engines treat experience as a real signal - measured by Core Web Vitals. | Recommended |
| Parasite SEO | Publishing promotional pages on someone else's high-authority domain to inherit its ranking signals - Google's site reputation abuse. | Deceptive |
| Press kit and newsroom | Maintain a public newsroom with boilerplate, logos, facts, experts, and a media contact so journalists and assistants can verify and cite you. | Recommended |
| Primary CTA clarity | Give each page one unmistakable primary action - clear label, visual priority, present where decisions happen on desktop and mobile. | Recommended |
| Private blog networks | Networks of owned sites that exist to link to a money site - classic link spam Google has targeted for years. | Deceptive |
| Quotable claims and evidence blocks | Write factual claims so they stay true when quoted alone - with numbers, named sources, and framing machines cannot misread as literal fact. | Recommended |
| Review platform presence | Build a disclosed, well-managed presence on the review platforms your buyers and AI assistants already trust. | Recommended |
| Structured data markup | Describe what your pages contain - articles, products, your organization - in the machine-readable vocabulary engines actually parse. | Recommended |
| Wikipedia and Wikidata presence | Earn (do not manufacture) an encyclopedia article and Wikidata item when independent sources already establish notability - and disclose any paid involvement. | Situational |