The IT ticket that shouldn’t exist
reads something like this: “We have 47 redirect chains. Some of them are 6 hops long. Can you clean these up?”
The developer assigned to the ticket has no idea what the right answer is, because the right answer requires understanding the content decisions that created the chains, the link equity implications of each one, and the publishing history that explains why any of this happened. They have access to none of that. So they do what they can: they shorten the chains they can shorten without breaking anything, they leave the complicated ones alone, and they close the ticket.
The chains remain. The problem recurs. And at some point, someone decides this is a developer problem because developers are the ones dealing with it.
It is not a developer problem.
Where technical debt comes from
Content technical debt accumulates the same way all technical debt does: through decisions made locally and quickly that have compounding consequences nobody priced in at the time.
Someone changed a URL without setting up a redirect. Someone set up the redirect but pointed it to the wrong page. Someone else set up another redirect on top of that one three months later during a site migration. Someone published a category page that duplicated the content of a pillar post because nobody checked whether the topic was already covered. Someone launched a new content series without updating the internal linking structure, leaving thirty pages effectively orphaned.
Each of these was a publishing decision. A content decision. A decision made by an editor, a content manager, a writer, a marketing director — someone on the content side who was thinking about the content and not about the structural implications.
The IT team didn’t cause any of this. Handing the cleanup to IT doesn’t fix the root cause.
The three categories of technical SEO debt that are editorial problems
Redirect chains are the most obvious example. Every redirect on your site represents a moment when a content decision — changing a URL, moving a page, renaming a section — was made without full awareness of the structural cost. Each redirect passes slightly less than the full link equity of a direct link. The longer the chain, the more equity bleeds.
Duplicate content is the second category. The most common source of duplicate content isn’t technical — it’s editorial. It’s publishing two posts that answer the same question from slightly different angles, letting them both index, and then watching them cannibalize each other’s rankings for years because nobody made a decision about which one was the definitive version.
Orphaned pages are the third. The internal linking strategy that connects your content into a coherent architecture is an editorial task. Every page on your site should be reachable through deliberate links from other content. When pages become isolated — because a site redesign removed a navigation item, because a linking update missed a page, because content was published without any links pointing to it — the authority they could accrue instead sits dormant. Architecture decisions are editorial decisions with long-term SEO consequences — and they’re almost never treated that way.
What the fix actually requires
The fix requires an editorial owner.
Not an IT ticket. Not a technical audit handed to a developer. An editor, a content strategist, or a fractional managing editor who understands both the content structure and its SEO implications, who can look at a redirect chain and say “this one should resolve to X because X is the canonical version,” who can look at two competing posts and decide which one survives.
The technical work is often simple once the editorial decisions are made. The problem is that nobody makes the editorial decisions, because nobody with editorial authority knows they’re responsible for them.
This is the gap that breaks content operations. The editors think technical SEO is IT’s problem. The developers know they don’t have the content context to make these calls. The result is a site that accumulates structural debt indefinitely, with occasional cleanup sprints that treat symptoms without addressing causes.
The process change
The structural fix is to put someone on the content side in the room when technical SEO decisions are made — and to give the content team a pre-publish checklist that forces these questions upstream.
Before you change a URL, decide where the redirect points and update your internal links. Before you publish a new post, check whether the topic is already covered and whether this post will cannibalize an existing ranking. Before you launch a new section, build the internal linking structure that will connect it to the rest of the site. Editorial decisions create crawl waste over time — every low-value page that stays indexed, every orphaned post that never gets linked, every redirect chain that compounds is a budget line Google charges against your best content.
None of these are technical tasks. They’re editorial tasks that happen to have technical consequences. The same logic applies to Open Graph configuration — an editorial decision about how your content presents itself when shared — and to Core Web Vitals failures, which are almost always the downstream result of design and editorial choices, not developer negligence.
The SEO for content teams framework is built around exactly this principle: that the decisions which determine organic performance are mostly made by people on the content side who often don’t realize they’re making them. Making those decisions deliberately, with awareness of their structural implications, is the job.
Your IT team is still waiting for you to tell them what to build.
Technical SEO debt is the accumulated cost of publishing decisions that were made without accounting for their structural consequences — changed URLs that created redirect chains, category pages that duplicate pillar content, posts published without internal links pointing to them. Like all technical debt, it compounds: each decision made locally and quickly adds to a total that becomes increasingly expensive to unwind. The debt is technical in its effects but editorial in its origins.
Technical SEO responsibility is split: developers handle the implementation, but editors and content managers own the decisions that create or prevent technical problems in the first place. URL changes, content architecture, internal linking structure, and duplicate content are all publishing decisions with technical consequences. Handing the cleanup to IT without involving editorial in the root-cause conversation is why the same problems recur — the developer can fix what’s there but can’t prevent what’s coming.
Each redirect in a chain passes slightly less than the full link equity of a direct link — approximately 99% per hop. A chain of five redirects passes roughly 95% of the original equity; a chain of ten passes roughly 90%. This matters because the links pointing to your old URLs are real assets that other sites built over years. Every hop in the chain between an external link and your current content is a small, compounding tax on that equity. It’s invisible until the audit that adds it up.
Most duplicate content on content-driven sites is editorial in origin, not technical. It’s publishing two posts that answer the same question from slightly different angles and letting both index, where they cannibalize each other’s rankings for years. It’s creating a category page that covers the same ground as a pillar post. The technical resolution — canonical tags, consolidation, redirects — is straightforward. The editorial decision about which version is definitive, and why, requires someone with content authority in the room.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call
This post is part of the Clifton Creative guide to SEO for content teams.