Files
adr-sml/docs/04-seo-spec.md
T
Pouya LajevardiandClaude Opus 5 fd5f610982 feat: D19 bounds the review loop; apply nine rulings; close Q46(a) and Q48–Q53
D19 into §3 and swept to all six destinations Pouya named: both agent briefs
(scope + severity filter), /build Phases 2–4 (non-gating questions, scope, stop
signal, two-round cap), /wrap, and CLAUDE.md (comments record decisions, not
history). Sweep verified by command, not recalled.

Rulings applied:
  Q46(a) PUBLISHABLE — three §4 Offerings rows flipped; gate 1 records
         [Pouya's stated basis], never [verified]. Step 5 unblocked.
  Q48    closed, not site-relevant.
  Q49    one §4 row, "Mediator"; read as declining Q49(b), so worksFor stays out.
  Q50    DEVIATES — ships as name + slogan, not the concatenation. Flagged.
  Q51    OBA sections stay; the regulator/voluntary distinction recorded.
  Q52    docs/reference/deploy-credential-verification.md — 18 read-only AWS
         calls, re-run rather than transcribed, access key ID redacted.
  Q53    memberOf emitted on /about/'s Person node.

Two review rounds. The headline finding was this session's own: the Q53 sweep
was asserted and never run, leaving six in-scope records saying memberOf was
withheld — including §12 R10, which is read aloud every session. Round 2 then
found that round 1's simplification had put memberOf on / as well; the per-page
opt-in is restored, because Pouya's ruling turns on /about/'s visible HTML.

Also fixed: MEMBERSHIP_ORGS had orphaned BOUTIQUE's D16 JSDoc; /'s title now
derives from the constants; §7's deploy row stated and retracted three facts.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0148NztQskLKKApP5SzAA78e
2026-08-28 15:52:52 -04:00

13 KiB
Raw Blame History

04 — Discoverability

The problem this project exists to fix. AGENTS.md §2 has the measurements.

Those measurements are under review — AGENTS.md Q34. They were taken on 2026-08-25; a re-fetch on 2026-08-26 returned a bundler harness whose real <head> sits JSON-escaped inside a <script> and whose application lives in nine UUID-named files that were not fetched. Some of §2 reproduced exactly (the 2.2 MB single file, the placeholder <title>); some could not be reproduced from the served HTML at all. Cite §2, and cite Q34 with it. Do not put any of these figures in public copy until Q34 closes.


The baseline being replaced

Now [verified 2026-08-25] Target
Content in server HTML SML Company · DISPUTE RESOLUTION · Unpacking... Every word
Indexable pages 1 17 + articles (19 fixed URLs, less the two /legal/* pages, which are noindex and excluded from the sitemap)
<title> SML Company · Dispute Resolution — pre-rebrand placeholder Unique per page
Meta description none Unique per page
<meta viewport> absent Present
Canonical URL none Every page
OG / Twitter tags none Every page
Structured data none Person, ProfessionalService, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb
robots.txt 403 Served
Sitemap none Generated at build
Favicon none Full set

Astro's static output solves most of this by existing. The rest is the spec below.

Why static output matters more than usual here

Google can sometimes render client-side JavaScript. Bing largely does not. LinkedIn's preview crawler does not. Slack's unfurler does not. And the crawlers behind AI assistants — increasingly how counsel and in-house teams find a neutral — generally do not.

A site that requires three CDN round trips and an in-browser Babel compile before producing a sentence is invisible to all of them. That is the whole argument for D1.


Metadata

Every page passes through one SEO component. A page without it is not finished.

title            5060 chars, unique. Pattern: "<Page> · Pouya Lajevardi".
                 `/` composes its own from the constants — `SITE.name` +
                 `SITE.tagline` — rather than a literal, so the masthead and
                 the title cannot drift. This spec carried the literal with an
                 ampersand after the composition shipped with interpuncts;
                 cite the constants, do not restate them (AGENTS.md §7 rule).
                 ARTICLES ARE THE EXCEPTION: no " · Pouya Lajevardi" suffix.
                 The suffix is 18 chars, so a headline that already reads
                 5060 renders at 6878 — over this ceiling. Measured against
                 the five launch headlines in 03-content-spec.md, the suffix
                 rule fails 5 of 5; without it, 4 of 5 pass. An article's
                 headline IS its <title>; `seoTitle` in the frontmatter
                 overrides it when a headline that reads well is out of range.
                 src/content.config.ts enforces this and names the offending
                 string and its length in the build error.
description      140160 chars, unique, written for a human, not stuffed
canonical        absolute, https, trailing slash
og:title/description/image/url/type/site_name/locale  (en_CA)
twitter:card     summary_large_image
robots           index,follow — except /legal/* which is noindex,follow

OG images: 1200 × 630. Never a screenshot.

RULED 2026-08-27 (AGENTS.md Q40, R15) — TWO kinds of card, not one, and the generator is deferred to build step 7. This spec said "one template" for all nineteen pages. Pouya split it:

"A portrait is the right OG image for / and /about/ — a face is the strongest social preview for a personal brand. It is the wrong one for nineteen pages, where a typed card carrying the page title would do the work.

But do not build the generator now and do not leave 'portrait everywhere' as an untracked interim. Ship it at step 7 alongside Insights, which needs per-article cards anyway — one build, one dependency, one review."

So:

Pages Card
/ and /about/ The portrait crop, src/assets/og-portrait.jpg. Not an interim — the decided answer
Every other page Generated at build with satori or astro-og-canvas, using the site's own type and palette: display headline on cream, infinity mark, designation line
Each article Per-article card from the same generator — the reason the two jobs are one build

Until step 7 every page shares the portrait, and that is a RECORDED interim that blocks cutover, not build step 3. It is tracked as R15 in AGENTS.md §12 with its removal trigger, because a link preview nobody on the team ever sees is exactly the kind of interim that becomes permanent by never being raised. The dependency choice is made against R11 on the day, not recalled from this paragraph.

Structured data

JSON-LD only. Validate against Google's Rich Results Test before cutover.

Type Where Notes
Person /about/, referenced site-wide Emitted: name, url, jobTitle, description, alumniOf (Bond University), knowsLanguage (en, fa), hasCredential (Q.Med), sameAs (LinkedIn), email, image. Emitted on /about/ only: memberOf — the four §4 memberships as Organization nodes (Q53, ruled 2026-08-28). / shows no memberships, so its Person node omits it: structured data represents the page it sits on. Withheld: worksFor — Q49(b) declined the row 2026-08-28; provider → Person → worksFor would assert a same-entity claim §4 does not row. (This enumeration listed worksFor as emitted while the same cell said it was withheld, and omitted url and email, which are — wrong in both directions. The enumeration is the part an implementer copies. Found by adversarial-reviewer.) CHANGED 2026-08-28 — Q47. This row read "jobTitle = 'Director of Firm Operations'; omit worksFor", which put the boutique title on a node whose url is this ADR practice's /about/ — so a consumer could attach it to this entity. Pouya's ruling reframes the field: jobTitle describes this practice, not the boutique role, which D16 keeps unnamed. The visible role line is unchanged and still reads "Director of Firm Operations at a Toronto litigation and ADR boutique". THE VALUE IS PRACTICE_JOB_TITLE IN src/data/site.ts AND THIS ROW DOES NOT RESTATE IT — §7's rule, applied to a string with a live revert trigger on it: this row carried the literal text for one pass, and adversarial-reviewer noted it would go stale the moment the constant moved. Cite, do not copy. worksFor IS WITHHELD — set for one pass under Q47, then reverted: ProfessionalService.provider is this Person, so provider → Person → worksFor asserts the same-entity claim schema.ts explicitly declines, and §4 says "alongside the practice" where the ruling says "operates through". memberOf is emitted — see the sentence above; Q53 closed 2026-08-28. (This cell asserted memberOf was both emitted and withheld for one pass, which is the defect it already records itself being caught for on worksFor, in the opposite direction. The enumeration is the part an implementer copies.) See src/data/schema.ts
ProfessionalService Home areaServed Toronto/Ontario, serviceType Mediation / Commercial arbitration / Mediation-arbitration (med-arb)scoped 2026-08-28 on claims-auditor's finding; this row instructed the unscoped class form "Mediation/Arbitration" that Q39 struck and that schema.ts deliberately does not follow. Family arbitration carries prescribed training and has its own NOT OFFERED row, so unscoped "Arbitration" is the struck universal in a field nobody reads. Do not widen these strings without a §4 row to widen them fromprovider → Person, priceRange once /fees/ is real. Never LegalService — schema.org defines it as a business providing legal advice and representation, which asserts in machine-readable form exactly what D13 bars and §4 Forbidden calls out
Service Each practice page serviceType, provider → Person, areaServed
Article Each article headline, description, datePublished, dateModified, author → Person, image
BreadcrumbList All nested pages Matches visible breadcrumbs
FAQPage /for-parties/, /med-arb/ Only where the visible page genuinely is Q&A. Never fabricate questions to farm a rich result

hasCredential must reflect reality. Q.Med is held. Q.Arb is not. Marking an unheld credential as held in structured data is a misrepresentation that happens to be machine-readable.

Crawlability

public/robots.txt is the artefact — read it, do not read a copy of it here. This spec used to reproduce the file inline and the reproduction had already drifted from it by 2026-08-26, which is the failure mode the AGENTS.md §7 rule exists to stop.

It disallows nothing, and that is deliberate. This spec previously prescribed Disallow: /legal/ alongside noindex on those pages, and the two cancel each other: a crawler forbidden to fetch a URL never reads the noindex on it. /legal/privacy/ and /legal/terms/ are linked from the footer of every page, so they are discovered regardless — and the likely result of the pair was Google listing the bare URLs as "no information available", the opposite of the intent, with the directive that would have suppressed them sitting unread behind the wall. noindex is what de-indexes; Disallow is what prevents fetching. Use the one that matches the problem, and never both on the same path.

Do not block AI crawlers. Being read by an assistant that a general counsel is using to shortlist neutrals is the point.

Sitemap: @astrojs/sitemap, excluding /legal/* and any draft: true article. Submit to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools at cutover.

Internal linking. Every practice page links to /mediation/ and /arbitration/; those link back to the practice areas; every article links to at least one practice page. This is what turns Insights into ranking power for the pages that convert. Breadcrumbs on every nested page.

404 page. Real, styled, with search-intent links out. CloudFront must return it with a genuine 404 status — not a 200, which the S3 website-endpoint pattern gets wrong by default.

Performance

Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, and the current build fails all of them.

Metric Budget
LCP < 2.0 s, Slow 4G
CLS < 0.05
INP < 150 ms
JS per route < 100 KB
Lighthouse (mobile) ≥ 95 all four categories — not measurable until step 7, see below

⚠️ Lighthouse verification is UNAVAILABLE until build step 7. @lhci/cli was removed on 2026-08-26 — it was the sole source of all 10 npm audit findings (7 high), 0.15.1 is latest so there was no clean upgrade, and it could not run at all with no pages and no lighthouserc. The budget below is not suspended; the tool that measures it is absent. Re-add at step 7 under AGENTS.md R11, checking for a patched release rather than assuming 0.15.1 is still the ceiling. Until then, a run that skips this is skipping something known — not something forgotten. AGENTS.md §7 has the state.

How: static HTML, self-hosted preloaded subset fonts, AVIF/WebP with explicit dimensions, critical CSS inlined, no third-party scripts on any page except the booking embed on /contact/ — and that one is lazy-loaded behind a click.

Local and professional presence

Not code, but it belongs in the launch checklist: Google Business Profile for the practice; ADRIC and ADRIO directory listings pointing at the site; a LinkedIn profile whose headline and Featured section match the brand (brief §VIII); consistent naming across all of them. Not "name, address and phone" — §4 publishes no phone number and no street address, only "Toronto, Ontario; by appointment". Directory forms that demand a full NAP get what §4 verifies and nothing more.

Post-launch verification

  • curl -s https://adr.smlcompany.ca/ | grep -c "<h1" returns ≥ 1
  • Every page renders its full text with JavaScript disabled
  • Rich Results Test passes on Person, ProfessionalService, Article
  • OG preview renders correctly in LinkedIn Post Inspector and Slack
  • Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing
  • No page returns 200 for a URL that should 404
  • Lighthouse ≥ 95 mobile on /, /about/, one practice page, one article — blocked until @lhci/cli is re-added at step 7. Do not tick this box from a manual Chrome DevTools run and call it the same check