Automation without limits. SEO with a few, as it turns out.
On the grill this week
Zapier
zapier.com
Roasted by
Yaron · Ben
S132:41
In this episode
The Ahrefs panic that wasn’t: Zapier’s rankings looked like they crashed from 12M to 6M, until we checked the live results and found them still sitting at number one.
Inside one of the best content engines on the internet: roughly 90 posts a month across nearly 4,000 blog articles, with zaps embedded as conversion elements right inside the content.
The versus-page playbook: how comparison pages and tool-pairing articles give Zapier bottom-of-funnel coverage most brands never build.
Then we opened the source code and found a technical situation nobody expected from a site this big.
The roast scorecard
Zapier
zapier.com
AFinal grade
show avg · C+
FDCBA
On the grill:Canonicals & duplicate contentSitemapsAuthor pages & attributionTitles & meta descriptionsHeading hierarchy
Key findings
No canonical tags anywhere, not even on the homepage, with the same URLs listed across multiple sitemaps.
Author pages exist but are only linked at the very bottom of articles, invisible to most readers.
Short meta descriptions and empty H2 tags scattered across top pages.
None of it is holding them back, which says more about domain strength than about best practices.
Top action items
1Bring back canonical tags across the site and dedupe the sitemap coverage.
2Surface author attribution at the top of articles, not just the footer.
3Fill in the empty headings and expand the truncated meta descriptions.
What we learned (steal these)
Never declare a traffic crash from one tool. Check live results and Search Console before you panic.
A-list domains get away with technical debt that would sink a smaller site. You are probably not an A-list domain yet.
Product placement inside genuinely helpful content converts without feeling like an ad.
Signed and grilled by
Yaron · Ben
SEO Bros · S1
Want notes like these on your own site?
Volunteer it for a roast and get the full teardown for free. Or subscribe and learn from everyone else's mistakes, which is cheaper for your ego.
