Review rejected SEO audit suggestions

# Review of rejected or materially revised audit suggestions

@Keegan-Vaz — please double-check this triage, especially the hosting and content-priority calls.

The attached SEO audit was reviewed against the current `main` branch and live HTML on 25 August 2026. Confirmed or corrected findings were opened separately:

- [#861](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/861) — lazy-load the search index.
- [#865](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/865) — conditionally load Mermaid/Highlight.js.
- [#860](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/860) — repair heading hierarchy.
- [#866](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/866) — replace the `/glossary/` stub.
- [#864](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/864) — improve meta-description generation.
- [#868](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/868) — make resource browsing incremental and crawlable.
- [#862](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/862) — enrich/link author profiles.
- [#863](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/863) — add `LearningResource` structured data.
- [#867](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/867) — fix glossary breadcrumbs.
- [#859](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/859) — make sitemap `lastmod` accurate.
- [#869](https://github.com/forrtproject/forrtproject.github.io/issues/869) — fix image alt text and dimensions.

## Suggestions not adopted as written

1. **“1,490 curated resources are 136 pagination clicks deep.”** This did not reproduce against the current deployment. `/resources/` is the canonical landing page, `/resources/page/2/` returns 404, and the current page is a roughly 3.8 MB headless/client-filtered document. The underlying performance and crawlability concern is real, so #868 addresses that corrected problem rather than implementing the audit’s stale URL/depth model.

2. **“Truncate every meta description at ~155–160 characters.”** Google documents no fixed meta-description limit and truncates snippets according to device width. #864 retains the useful parts—accurate, unique, page-specific descriptions and word-boundary handling—without treating 155–160 characters as an SEO rule.

3. **“Add security headers by moving off GitHub Pages.”** The headers are absent, but GitHub Pages is the current hosting constraint and the audit provides no evidence that a migration is justified by the SEO findings alone. This can be revisited if FORRT moves behind Cloudflare/Netlify or needs a broader security-hardening project; it is not opened as an issue now.

4. **“Fix glossary thin content by increasing word counts.”** No padding is recommended. Google explicitly warns against writing to a target word count, and the glossary already provides definitions, references, related terms, translations, and reviewer attribution. The higher-value missing connection—linking contributors to verified author entities—is covered by #862.

5. **Generic `og:image` on glossary pages.** A shared, valid social preview image is not inherently a defect, and the audit did not demonstrate a broken preview or material user impact. It is lower priority than the confirmed template issues.

6. **Duplicate preconnects.** The duplication is a small, localized performance cleanup (the chatbot partial repeats the Google Fonts preconnects), but it is not material enough to warrant a separate issue alongside the larger payload fixes. It can be removed opportunistically while touching the head partial.

7. **Case-sensitive routing and double-slash paths.** These are edge-case URL behaviours with no demonstrated high-value traffic or safe server-side redirect mechanism on the current GitHub Pages setup. Avoid adding redirect hacks that could affect existing URLs.

8. **Truncated curated-resource slugs.** Changing existing slugs risks breaking backlinks and the audit itself calls this cosmetic. Preserve the URLs; address naming only for newly generated content if desired.

9. **Create a Wikidata item for FORRT.** This is an optional entity/editorial project, not a demonstrated technical defect. It needs an ownership and verification decision before becoming engineering work.

10. **Add `llms.txt`.** This is optional and not a Google requirement; the audit correctly notes that a useful file for this corpus would require ongoing editorial curation. No issue is warranted at present.

11. **Remove all short glossary/resource pages based on word-count thresholds.** The content is intentionally dictionary/resource-style and includes scholarly attribution. No evidence was provided that length alone is causing a meaningful indexing problem, so no deletion or padding work is proposed.

Review the audit triage in this issue alongside the separately opened issues #859–#869. Start by checking which findings were confirmed or corrected and whether the rejected suggestions require a new decision; done means the triage is confirmed or a specific follow-up issue is opened.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.