Teaching Search Engines About Aux Battles

A short one. This batch of changes was mostly keyword work aimed at how people search around chat and stream contexts, which reads, in hindsight, like early groundwork for something that wasn't public yet: the Twitch integration that would land about a month later. At the time it was just an SEO pass, the foreshadowing only became obvious looking back.

What makes this batch worth its own post isn't the size of the change, it's the timing. Daily impressions had been sitting in the low 70s for a while, June 24th logged 4 clicks and 72 impressions. The day this went out, June 25th, jumped to 14 clicks and 81 impressions. The next day, 9 clicks and 114 impressions. The day after that, 28 clicks and 133 impressions. Average position dropped sharply that same week, from the 5-6 range down toward 3.

Three commits don't prove cause and effect, and I'm not going to pretend they do. What I can say honestly is that this is the week the number of people finding the site started climbing, and it kept climbing from here.