SEO + Navigation Rail Upgrade for 2026

2026-02-04 | By takescake | 2 min read

We tightened our crawl signals and gave players more places to go after they land on a page.

What Changed

Navigation rail (site-wide): A sticky “Jump to the right tool” belt now sits under the header, with quick entries into semantic search, scanner, Deck Studio, collection tracking, and guides. It disappears on the camera page so the full-screen capture stays clean.
Trust-forward footer: New columns for Tools, Explore, and Trust, plus a clear affiliate disclosure, ai.txt link for agents, and a human contact line (hello@takescake.com).
About page: /about now explains who we are, our sources (Scryfall + tcgcsv), NLWeb compliance, and our weekly shipping cadence.
Canonical-aware posts index: Pagination and custom sort now emit a query-aware canonical plus prev/next markers to reduce duplicate-index churn for /posts.

Lower bounce, higher depth: The rail and footer give players (and crawlers) obvious next clicks to scanners, decks, and posts instead of dropping off.
Clear E-E-A-T: About + disclosures make it obvious who operates takescake and how we monetize, which improves trust and spam detection signals.
Cleaner indexation: Canonicals on /posts keep paginated and sorted feeds from being treated as soft duplicates, while OG/Twitter still stay aligned.

Load any page (except /camera) and see the sticky navigation rail with six calls to action.
Scroll to the footer: Tools/Explore/Trust columns, TCGplayer + Amazon disclosure, ai.txt link, and contact email should be visible.
Visit /about for the new E-E-A-T explainer and policy grid.
Open page source on /posts?page=2 and confirm the canonical includes the query params, and the metadata shows prev/next markers in meta[name="prev-url"] and meta[name="next-url"].

Surface “top searched cards today” and “recently scanned” widgets on the homepage to showcase freshness.
Expand structured data on card pages to include condition/finish hints in offers when available.
Add Lighthouse + CWV gating before deploy so indexability and UX stay fast.