u/UnderstandingFit2711

Been working on a programmatic SEO site and noticed all the related links were showing in alphabetical order by default. Felt wrong intuitively — why would the most relevant suggestion be determined by the alphabet?

Read about Google's Reasonable Surfer patent and the 2024 API leak — both suggest semantically relevant links pass more PageRank than random ones in the same position. So I replaced alphabetical ordering with a scoring system based on topical relevance between pages.

Too early to see if it moved anything in GSC. But genuinely curious whether this is worth thinking about or if I spent time on something that doesn't matter compared to content and backlinks.

Has anyone here tested internal link ordering changes and seen measurable results? Would really value input from people who've done this at scale.

Been learning about server-side image processing lately and HEIC turned out to be more complicated than expected.

HEIC is still the iPhone default in 2026 — iOS 17, 18, nothing changed. And HEIC browser support is basically just Safari. Chrome and Firefox still can't render it natively, Firefox has had a ticket open since 2017.

So every iPhone user uploading a photo sends a file that most browsers can't display.

Server-side options I found while researching:

heic-convert — pure JS, no native dependencies, works for simple cases

sharp — popular Node.js library but the prebuilt binary doesn't include HEIC support because of HEVC patent issues. You get a cryptic codec error and have to build from source.

libvips — significantly faster than ImageMagick, much less memory usage. No GhostScript delegation either, which matters given the security research about ImageMagick that came out last week.

For output WebP seems like the better target than JPG now — browser support is basically universal and files are noticeably smaller.

Anyone else dealt with this? Curious what approach people actually use in production.