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PYC HUB

About PYC Hub

PYC Hub is the public-facing notebook of Phil Yarrow. It collects six years of SEO work into a single place — a knowledge base of practitioner articles, a glossary of the statistical and machine-learning methods that actually show up in modern search, a blog of shorter posts, and a small set of construction-industry case studies.

Who runs this

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I’m Phil. I’ve worked in SEO consultancy since 2020, primarily on the technical and content sides — site migrations, schema rollouts, internal linking redesigns, and the slow rebuilding of topical authority on regulated-industry sites. The work is unglamorous and the wins compound; this site is where I write down what compounds.

If you want to reach me, the GitHub link in the top navigation is the most reliable channel.

What’s here

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  • Knowledge Base — 21 articles on technical SEO, on-page optimisation, local SEO, content strategy, and analytics. Aimed at practitioners moving past the basics.
  • Glossary — 20 short entries on algorithms and statistical methods used in SEO analysis. Bayesian inference, k-nearest neighbours, principal component analysis, ARIMA, and friends.
  • Blog — 10 posts, most of them analyses of the index data rather than general advice: what gets a business named by an AI assistant, an audit of our own scoring weights, and the 526 measured firms that rank for nothing at all.
  • Local Indices — 32 recurring, data-driven league tables measuring how local businesses perform online: 1,156 businesses across ten sectors and seven South West towns.

Why a static site

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The previous incarnation of this site ran on WordPress with Elementor and around seventeen plugins. It was slow, the SEO plugin overhead was self-defeating, and editing it in 2024 felt like 2017. In June 2026 I migrated the content to Astro + Starlight on Cloudflare Workers. The full migration is open-source at philyarrow/hub.philyarrow and documented in PLAN.md and the commit history.

How this site is built

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  • Astro 6 + Starlight 0.39 for content + sidebar + search + dark mode.
  • Cloudflare Workers with static-asset binding for hosting.
  • Pagefind for search (~1,260 pages indexed, ~1ms p95 lookup).
  • MDX for content; per-section autogenerated sidebar; custom Geist-mono branding.
  • Source: github.com/philyarrow/hub.philyarrow.

If you’re rebuilding a WordPress site as a static Astro site and want the scripts, they’re in scripts/ of the repo: a streaming phpMyAdmin SQL dump parser, an HTML-to-Markdown extractor with Turndown, a yauzl-based media filter that pulls referenced files out of a wp-content/uploads.zip, and a Cloudflare _redirects generator from WP routing data. The code is opinionated but lifts cleanly.