Blog
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9,220 pages indexed. Nobody decided to publish them.
A site with 9,220 pages indexed and roughly 8,000 visits a month. Another with 1,630 indexed and a catalogue of a few hundred real products. A third with 1,265 indexable pages, of which 1,082 were blog posts. None of those businesses set out to publish that much. In every case the platform did it, one…
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An SEO audit is not a crawl report
If what you were handed is a list of issues sorted by severity, with a count next to each, you were handed a crawl report. It may have cost you two thousand pounds and it may have a cover page with your logo on it. It is still a crawl report. I am not being…
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How to read a crawl without drowning in it
The first time you export a crawl of a real site you get a spreadsheet with forty columns and several thousand rows, and the honest reaction is to close it. I have been doing this for fifteen years and I still read almost none of it. Here is the order I actually go in, which…
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If you only do three things, which three?
Every audit I hand over has more in it than the client will ever do. That is not a flaw in the audit. It is what an audit is, a complete picture, and the complete picture has always been bigger than one quarter’s capacity. So the useful question is not what is wrong. It is:…
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Deindexed pages: find out what shipped that week
A page that was in Google and is now not is a different problem from a page that was never accepted, and the two get treated as one thing constantly. If the page was never indexed, you are asking whether it is good enough, which is the crawled, currently not indexed conversation and it is…
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Soft 404s: Google is usually right
A soft 404 is Google telling you that a page returned 200 OK and then failed to contain anything. People treat it as a bug in Google’s classifier. In my experience it is almost always correct, and arguing with it is the wrong instinct. The page really is empty. Google has simply noticed before you…
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Crawl budget: almost nobody reading this has one
Almost nobody reading this has a crawl budget problem, and I would rather say that at the top than sell you five hundred words of suspense. Google publishes the thresholds. Their large site owner’s guide to managing crawl budget says it is worth thinking about for sites with one million or more unique pages whose…
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The 1,630-page store with no robots.txt, and what that actually told me
A car parts retailer with 1,630 pages indexed, selling every day, had no robots.txt file at all. Not a permissive one. Not an empty one. The URL returned a 404. That is not a crisis, and I want to be clear about that before anything else, because “you have no robots.txt” is the kind of…
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1,562 missing H1s and seven H1s on one page. Same issue, opposite problem.
Two findings from my audit folder, both of which any crawler would file under the same heading. A Shopify homeware store: 1,562 URLs with a missing or empty H1. A chiropractic clinic: 7 H1 tags on the home page, several of them blank. Sort those by severity and the tool puts the first one two…
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Four ways canonical tags get misused, and one of them is my own advice
Four sites, four different things done wrong with one tag. I pulled these out of the audit folder because they make a set, and because the fourth one is a recommendation I wrote myself, twice, and got wrong. 1. The tag is simply absent, at scale A classic car marketplace: 8,317 pages with no canonical…