They’re usually quite specific about what the penalty is about, and you have to prioritize to fix it immediately. Often, it’s a suspicious backlink, but other times, it’s not a fair penalty. When I started working on the website, I noticed the website traffic was going down rapidly, which alarmed me to run a quick penalty audit. Compare your audit results between crawls to track your progress. But if you prioritize speed and being able to work with just one tool for many key SEO tasks, Semrush’s My Reports is the better option. DashThis lets you create SEO reports fast, or fully customize them when you need more control.
What our users are saying
Have a page which no longer exists, or which now exists at a new URL? It’s a good idea to make sure all high-traffic pages which formerly linked to that page now 301 redirect to the new page; or, that they at least redirect back your home page. Contrary to popular opinion, broken links don’t result in site penalties. As content cycles in and out, and your site’s structure changes over time, 404s occur naturally. That said, broken links in inopportune places can fracture your internal linking structure.
Step 4: On-Page and Off-Page Analysis
The biggest culprits are JavaScript and CSS files, oversized images or too many images, poor website hosting and third-party scripts (i.e., Hotjar, social media pixels etc.). Orphaned pages are pages that are not linked from anywhere else on your website. Since Google finds and index pages via links, it is important to make sure pages can be found by optimizing internal links. Furthermore, in your crawl results it will show you how many links are pointing to each page and how many are pointing out to other pages (inlinks and outlinks). You will want to keep an eye out for pages that have too few links going to them or too many links going out.
Popular tools used in an SEO Audit
There are also a number of excellent speed testing tools available, including PageSpeed Insights from Google and my personal favorite, GTmetrix. But in regards to external links specifically, if your page has no outgoing links, it affects all of the benefits of external links as discussed above. External links are often used to back up sources in the form of citations. For example, if I am writing a blog post and discussing metrics from a study, I’ll externally link to where I found that authoritative source. External links are hyperlinks within your pages that link to another domain.
- Review your files for unused CSS or JavaScript that could inflate load times and unnecessarily increase file sizes.
- The canonicalization of your website content is your final major technical consideration.
- The tool perfectly picked up the low-quality content and explained why it scored so badly.
- – They enhance user experience, increasing engagement, conversions, and retention.
- This type of SEO audit will involve on-page efforts like image optimization but largely refers to performance metrics like site speed and security.
From here, the tool will create a list of key recommendations based on these sections. It then gives you a grade and explains how well your content demonstrates the expertise required to write YMYL content. Any piece of content that is classified as YMYL SEO Anomaly has to prove to Google that it’s accurate and authoritative.