Issue: If your site can be accessed with or without “www” (e.g., both www.example.com and example.com), search engines might treat these as separate pages, splitting SEO value between them and hurting rankings. Fix: Decide which version (with or without “www”) […]
Issue: Your sitemap.xml should only list clean URLs that lead directly to unique, active pages. Including redirects, duplicate content, or error pages (non-200 status codes) can confuse search engines, waste crawl resources, or even get your sitemap rejected. Fix: Go
Issue: A sitemap.xml file with formatting errors can’t be read by search engines, which may cause them to ignore it entirely. This means they could miss important pages on your site, impacting your search visibility and indexing. Fix: Use the
Issue: Errors in your robots.txt file can block search engines from important pages or expose private content. Misconfigurations here can harm your search rankings and SEO efforts. Fix: Use Google’s robots.txt Tester to find and fix errors in your robots.txt
Issue: Pages with 5xx status codes (server errors) can’t be accessed by users or search engines, hurting user experience and SEO. Prolonged issues can lead to a drop in traffic. Fix: Identify and resolve the root causes of the server
Issue: Duplicate meta descriptions make it harder for search engines and users to distinguish your pages, wasting opportunities for relevant keywords. Fix: Write a unique and relevant meta description for each page. Tip: Unique meta descriptions improve SEO and help
Issue: Broken internal images don’t display properly, creating a poor user experience and signaling low quality to search engines, which can hurt your rankings. Fix: Check for any broken images and either update the URL, replace missing or damaged images,
Issue: Some pages couldn’t be crawled due to incorrect URL formats. This can happen if: URLs are malformed (extra characters or typos) The server takes too long to respond (over 5 seconds) The server is blocking access Fix: Ensure all
Issue: DNS resolution errors happen when the crawler can’t find your website’s hostname, making your pages inaccessible to search engines. Fix: Contact your web hosting provider and ask them to check and fix the DNS settings for your site. How
Issue: Some of your pages couldn’t be accessed by the crawler. This usually happens if: The server takes too long to respond (over 5 seconds) The server is blocking access Fix: Reach out to your web hosting support team to
Issue: Broken internal images can’t display properly, making your site look unprofessional and signaling to search engines that your page might be low quality. Fix: Locate and fix any broken images by correcting their URL, replacing them, or removing them
Issue: Pages with very similar content (85% or more) are seen as duplicates, which can hurt your SEO. Google will typically only index one version, which may not be the page you want, and may penalize sites with duplicate content
Issue: Duplicate <title> tags make it hard for search engines to identify which page is the most relevant for a search, lowering the chances of ranking well. They also confuse users, who may not know which page to click. Fix:
Issue: Missing <title> tags make it harder for search engines and users to understand your page’s purpose. Without a clear title, Google may label the page as low quality, which can reduce its ranking potential and discourage clicks in search
Hreflang conflicts typically occur when the hreflang attribute is misconfigured. Here are common causes and fixes: Incorrect Language or Region Codes: Ensure your hreflang values use valid ISO 639-1 language codes and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 region codes. Example: `en-us` for
I got tired of searching for Semrush’s recommendations for the hundreds of issues it flags in a site audit – here’s their official guide if you want to compare. So, I compiled them into this post below and have been
keeping it simple Real Client Invoice Breakdown This document offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at an actual invoice I sent to a client. A big thanks to Rabin for letting me showcase this. I ended up breaking down this invoice
