The product
Notum Learn is a spaced repetition flashcard app for STEM students, programmers and self-learners, with LaTeX maths and code built into the cards. Its founder, Mads Pagh, owns and builds it while studying computer science at Aarhus University.
Its public side matters for search: subject pages, public decks, collections and comparison pages that people can find on Google before they ever sign up.
What the audit found
The foundations were solid. All 308 pages we found loaded, and every one had a title, a description and a canonical tag. That is a good base, and it meant the work was a short list of focused fixes, not a rebuild.
The problems sat in places a crawler report would list without saying why they matter: the path to paying, pages whose content did not match their label, and markup that was one property short. We put four first.
The four fixes we put first
| What we found on 30 September | The fix we sent | On 14 October |
|---|---|---|
| The upgrade button was broken. On the pricing page, "Sign in to upgrade" linked to /login, which showed a 404 error. Someone ready to pay could not get through. | Point it at the sign-in pop-up the rest of the site already used, and bring the person back to pricing after they sign in. | Fixed. /login now opens the sign-in. |
| Subject pages showed the wrong decks. All 9 subject pages listed the same 12 decks, so the Mathematics page showed French and pharmacology. | Show only decks tagged with that subject, and show fewer rather than fill the page with unrelated ones. | Fixed. Each subject page now shows decks chosen for that subject. |
| Flashcard markup was missing one property. Every deck page had flashcard structured data, but each question lacked eduQuestionType set to "Flashcard", which Google requires. | Add it once to the deck page template, which covers all 273 decks, then test a few in Google's Rich Results Test. | Fixed on every deck we checked. |
| Placeholder text on a public collection. The Data Mining collection's description was test text that had gone public, shown on the page and in the community gallery. | Clean it up, and add a check so empty or nonsense descriptions cannot go public. | Fixed. The placeholder is gone. |
One item from further down our list is also done: a deck that does not exist now returns a proper 404, rather than a page that says "not found" while telling search engines everything is fine.
The findings are from the audit as sent on 30 September 2026. The "On 14 October" column is our own recheck of the public site that day: the /login address, all nine subject pages, the Data Mining collection, a missing deck address and the structured data on six decks. Notum made every change, all within two weeks of the audit. We advised; we did not touch the code.
The click-through question
The audit also looked at click-through rate from Google. Our view was that a low rate is not always a sign of a problem. When a site starts appearing for many new searches at low positions, its average click-through rate falls even if nothing got worse, and pages on Google's second page get few clicks at all.
The practical advice was narrower than "improve CTR":
- Find searches where a relevant page already sits around positions 4 to 15. A better title can win clicks there.
- Put the topic first in deck titles. Most ended in "Flashcards (N Cards) - Notum Learn", which pushed the subject to the end, where Google cuts titles off.
- Change a small group of pages at a time, note the date, and wait a few weeks before judging. At low traffic, a handful of clicks swings the rate a lot.
Deck titles now lead with the topic, for example "Calculus Flashcards | Notum Learn". It is too early to say what that has done for clicks, and we will not guess.
What Mads said
"…it was worth gold!!. They caught a broken upgrade link to a 404 (yikes ..), flagged our subject page cross-contamination, and gave killer advice on fixing our CTR. Massive thanks!"
Mads Pagh, founder of Notum Learn, in his post on X, 1 October 2026
Where it stands
Every fix on the short list is live. We have not measured any change in rankings or clicks, and this page does not claim one. What it shows is the part of SEO work that can be checked on the day: a path to paying that works, pages that show what they say, and markup that meets Google's rules.
Thank you to Mads for acting on the findings so quickly, and for letting us share them.
If you run a product with a public side that people should find on Google, we offer a one-off review by the hour, or you can get in touch. For SaaS and app sites, the same checks are part of our SEO service.
Mads Pagh agreed to us naming Notum and quoting his post. The figures about his site are from our audit and our recheck of his public pages. Notum's Search Console data is not used.