whoami

Christian Schmidt.

SEO, Data, Code — on the web since 1998.

Three disciplines I've been working in for over two decades.

Data

Current focus.

These days, I spend most of my time working with data. This includes everything from gathering and cleaning it to running it through pipelines, analyzing it, and finally getting it into dashboards and small tools that people actually use. Gathering is often the most demanding part. My specialty is sources that would rather not be read. I focus on scalable scraping, evading rate limits and fingerprinting, and overcoming whatever modern anti-bot systems throw at us. But that's just the beginning. The interesting part comes after. My background in SEO is helpful here. I tend to consider crawlers, indexing, and infrastructure earlier than people with only a background in data do.

SEO & Online Marketing

Where it began.

The technical side of SEO, including crawling, indexing, and log analysis, has always been my focus. It's the infrastructure-heavy end that most people prefer to avoid because it requires reading source code, headers, and crawl logs. This is exactly where my background as a developer pays off. I can see why a page isn't getting indexed properly and fix it directly instead of writing a ticket and hoping someone implements the fix correctly. I've seen pretty much every Google era come and go over the years: the days when white text on a white background still worked; the various tricks in between; and all the way to whatever the current AI-search shift turns out to be. From 2010 to 2021, I ran KeywordMonitor, a SaaS tool for tracking search rankings. I built and operated it myself, from the front end to the crawler. These days, I've gradually shifted toward data. I still do SEO, but more occasionally, usually as part of larger data projects or when a problem requires deep technical knowledge. Online marketing and affiliate marketing are in the same area for me and have moved more into the background over time.

Code

The constant.

I actually started with programming as a kid. The web only came into it for me later. I made the jump entirely without irony thanks to a CD labeled “99 Ready to use HTML-Layouts” from the late '90s. What has remained is my preference for building things rather than specifying them, even though the tools have obviously evolved since then. Code has always been more of a tool than a goal for me. It's the thing that lets me do SEO and, later, data work the way I want, without depending on off-the-shelf software. Small web applications, internal tools, data pipelines, automation—whatever solves the problem gets used. Over the years, this has evolved into a general approach spanning multiple languages and stacks, without loyalty to any particular framework.