9 Common Technical SEO Issues That Actually Matter
In this article, we’ll see how to find and fix technical SEO issues, but only those that can seriously affect your rankings. If you’d like to follow along, get Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console (both are free) and check for the following issues. 1. Indexability issues Indexability is a webpage’s ability to be indexed by search engines. Pages that are not indexable can’t be displayed on the search engine results pages and can’t bring in any search traffic. Three requirements must be met for a page to be indexable: The page must be crawlable. If you haven’t blocked Googlebot from entering the page robots.txt or you have a website with fewer than 1,000 pages, you probably don’t have an issue there. The page must not have a noindex tag (more on that in a bit). The page must be canonical (i.e., the main version). Solution In Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT): Open Site Audit Go to the Indexability report Click on issues related to canonicalization and “noindex” to see affected pages For canonicalization issues in this report, you will need to replace bad URLs in the link rel=”canonical” tag with valid ones (i.e., returning an “HTTP 200 OK”). As for pages marked by “noindex” issues, these are the pages with the “noindex” meta tag placed inside their code. Chances are most of the pages found in the report there should stay as is. But if you see any pages that shouldn’t be there, simply remove the tag. Do make sure those pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt first. Recommendation Click on the question mark on the right to see instructions on how to fix each issue. For more detailed instructions, click on the “Learn more” link. 2. Sitemap issues A sitemap should contain only pages that you want search engines to index. When a sitemap…
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