About me

Hi there!

My name is Andrey, I'm a full-stack web developer, eCommerce micro-SaaS owner, and SEO specialist.

SEO

In this blog, I want to focus more on SEO, since I have never seen a more controversial topic in the IT industry. It's very common to see two completely opposite opinions on the same topic in the same discussion, both of which may sound convincing, and both of which may be supported by other commenters. And what's even more baffling - usually it is not even based on real data but on some kind of "common sense", i.e. just opinions based on beliefs about how Google should operate, or just regurgitating some hearsay.

This is unthinkable to me as a tech guy. There should be no room for make-believe arguments here. And since we don't know exactly how Google's algorithm works, there's only one way to find out: to test it. That's why I conduct granular case studies (i.e. I'm isolating just one thing and testing how just this one thing works). In my opinion, this is the most bulletproof way to find out what works and what doesn't, and I will be sharing the results with you here.

I also firmly believe that when things go south, it's useless to rant on forums about how unfair Google is. I understand that it's frustrating, and you just want to go and vent on r/SEO. But this is just a waste of time and energy. It's better to focus on what we can control. There are still 10 spots on the first page, and someone will always occupy it, so the only rational thing to do is to reverse engineer the algorithm by constantly testing it and researching the winners. Hence the name of this blog: Don't Blame The Algo.

SaaS

I run a bootstrapped eCommerce micro-SaaS, which is available as a standalone website and a Shopify app for merchants' convenience to seamlessly embed its functionality into their stores. I would prefer not to share its name here, since it may draw unwanted attention from competitors, since I'm talking about such sensitive topics as SEO here. Even though not all of my experiments/case studies that I'm publishing here are related to my SaaS website, I still prefer to keep it under the radar. But I will be sharing some insights that I have learned from running a SaaS business here.

Web development

This is another topic that I will be touching on here sometimes. Even though the web is full of various guides and tutorials, sometimes it's surprisingly difficult to find what you need, especially when the request is very specific. I will be sharing some of my experiences here, and I hope that it will be helpful to someone.

I have been working as a full-stack web developer for about 15 years. I have experience in a wide range of technologies, including: PHP (Laravel, Yii, CodeIgniter, (WordPress, WooCommerce - yeah, I know)), JavaScript (React, Node.js, Express), CSS (Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS), MySQL, Redis, Apache, Nginx, Docker, Git.