Editorial policy
How this content is made.
Chimney advice is safety advice. Getting it wrong costs a reader money at best and a house fire at worst, so the rules below are not aspirations — most of them are checks that fail a deploy. Where a rule depends on a person rather than a script, this page says so.
What every page answers to
The rules
- 1
A statistic describes a market, never your building
Every geo page on this site is built from measurements — freeze-thaw counts from a named weather station, housing age from Census tables for that exact place. Those describe a city. They cannot describe your chimney. So the copy says what is common locally, names the question worth asking, and stops at: only an inspection on site tells you about yours. A page that hands down a verdict and is then contradicted by the pro who arrives costs more trust than the paragraph was worth.
Written into the generator and into every content agent's instructions.
- 2
No invented numbers, ever
No made-up prices, no response times nobody measured, no percentages, no study citations we cannot produce. Published cost bands are ranges, dated, and the page says the real figure comes from a written estimate. If a number is not read from the database or from a named public dataset at render time, it does not go on a page.
pnpm seo:audit fails the build on invented response times, unmeasured percentages and placeholder data.
- 3
No claim the business cannot make
VIO CHIMNEY does not perform chimney work and does not employ the technicians who visit your home. So no page may say it does, no page may promise workmanship or outcomes the contract disclaims, and no page may call anyone certified without naming who certified them.
pnpm seo:audit fails the build on all three, including the possessive forms a fixed phrase list misses.
- 4
Standards are quoted the way they are written
NFPA 211 sets an annual inspection requirement, with cleaning when the flue's condition calls for it. It is not an annual sweeping standard, and we published it as one on forty-eight pages before we caught it. The canonical wording of each standards claim now lives in one file, with the specific wrong versions recorded next to it.
pnpm seo:audit fails the build on a known distortion; a test suite proves each rule still catches the real error it was written for.
- 5
Two pages, two questions
Where two search terms both deserve a page, both get one — and each must answer something the other does not. Chimney sweep covers the trade and the standard; chimney cleaning covers when yours is due and what the quote should include. If they converge, one of them should not exist.
pnpm seo:duplicates compares every page pair in a family and fails the build past a threshold.
- 6
Reviews are real or they are absent
Only verified customer reviews may appear publicly. We have run this site with no reviews showing rather than with placeholder ones, and we would do it again — the FTC rule on fake reviews exists for good reason and a fabricated testimonial is worth less than an empty section.
Demo reviews are flagged in the database and gated off in production.
People and method
Who reviews what
Hand-written pages — every service, problem, cost and safety page, and every guide — are reviewed by Ethan Miller, chimney specialist, vio chimney, and carry the date of that review in the byline.
The geo pages are different and their bylines say so. There are several thousand of them, composed by a deterministic generator from dated public measurements, and nobody has read each one individually. Claiming otherwise next to a real person's photograph would be the exact kind of overclaim this page exists to prevent — so those bylines say the data was rebuilt on a date and that a person reviewed the method.
Tell us
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know — particularly a safety claim. Email legal@viochimney.com with the page address and what is wrong with it. A factual error gets corrected on the page rather than quietly deleted, and where the error was material the page says what changed.
Sources
Where the numbers come from
Every source this site relies on, with the date each was last opened and checked. Climate and housing figures on a city page cite the specific station and table used for that place.
What VIO CHIMNEY is, and who performs the work, is set out at how it works and in full in the Lead & Referral Disclosure.