1. Starting Point and Objectives#

The blog runs on Hexo with the Anatole theme. It had years of content, but little investment in search hygiene or monetization.
The mission: align canonical URLs, ship a sitemap and robots policy, improve load experience, and make Google AdSense automatic + manual units work together.
All work was executed locally, validated with hexo generate, and published through the existing sync script for repeatability.

2. SEO Plumbing#

Updated _config.yml to use https://imchenway.com for url, ensuring canonical, RSS, and pagination links point to the live hostname.
Added a sitemap section so Hexo emits public/sitemap.xml, then surfaced it in source/robots.txt for crawler discovery[1][2].
Keeping ads.txt in place prevents monetization warnings and aligns with AdSense best practice.

Extended themes/anatole/layout/partial/head.pug with canonical, Open Graph, and Twitter Card tags that respect page titles, excerpts, and full URLs.
Calculated the <html lang> attribute from page metadata or global defaults inside partial/layout.pug, so English posts no longer appear as Simplified Chinese in SERPs[3].
Re-enabled the tag cloud and previous/next navigation to boost internal link density without touching individual posts.

Installed hexo-lazyload-image, turning on global lazyload with a neutral placeholder so long-form posts don’t block first paint.
Added hexo-all-minifier to compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. Combined with lazyload, this trims network payloads before any CDN work.

Switched shared scripts (jquery.js, jquery-migrate, jquery.appear) to defer, reducing render-blocking time.
Verified output via npx hexo clean && npx hexo generate to inspect the generated HTML, check for lazyload attributes, and ensure no duplicate script tags remained.

Left a single adsbygoogle.js include in the site head so automatic ads can decide placement without script duplication.
Introduced a .post-ad block in themes/anatole/layout/post.pug with the provided in-article unit (data-ad-slot="8561874775"). Each article ends with:

.post-ad
  ins.adsbygoogle(...)
  script.
    (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

The manual slot coexists with automatic ads, giving predictable inventory for long-form readers while leaving the rest to Google’s layout engine[4].

npm install after editing package.json to pull in sitemap, lazyload, and minifier plugins.
npx hexo clean && npx hexo generate to produce static assets; confirm public/sitemap.xml, public/robots.txt, and the .post-ad fragment exist.
Spot-check public/en/ai-performance-budgeting/index.html to verify canonical/OG tags and ad markup.
Publish via /Users/david/hypha/sync-all.sh, which stashes other repos, builds, commits, and pushes the Hexo site.
Submit https://imchenway.com/sitemap.xml in Google Search Console, then run “URL Inspection” on updated posts to prompt reindexing.

Coherence beats silver bullets: canonical + sitemap + robots deliver the best return when deployed together.
Minimal theme surgery goes a long way: small Pug tweaks fixed language detection, metadata, and navigation without redesigning the theme.
Perf + monetization synergy: lazyload and minification improve Core Web Vitals and create more opportunities for AdSense to fill impressions.
Iteration continues: future improvements could include WebP conversion, critical CSS inlining, and richer dashboards in Search Console to steer content strategy.