I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly.
I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes.
I'm specifically going to look for crawling, indexing and potential Panda threatening issues like:
- Architecture (unnecessary redirection, orphaned pages, nofollow)
- Indexing & Crawling (canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, redirects, robots.txt, server errors)
- Duplicate content & On page SEO (repeated text, pagination, parameter based, dupe/missing titles, h1s, etc..)
Don't worry if you're not technical, most of the tools and methods I'm going to use are very well documented around the web.
Let's meet our volunteers!
Here's what I'll be using to do this job:
- SEOmoz toolbar - Make sure highlight nofollow links is turned on - so you can visibly diagnose crawl path restrictions
- Screaming Frog Crawler - Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot) - Full user guide here
- Chrome, and Firefox (FF will have Javascript, CSS disabled and User Agent as Googlebot) - To look for usability problems caused by CSS or Javascript
- Google search queries - to check the index for issues like content duplication, dupe subdomains, penalties etc..
Here are other checks I've done, but left out in the interest of keeping it short:
- Open Site Explorer - Download a back link report to see if you're missing out on links pointing to orphaned, 302 or incorrect URLs on your site. If you find people linking incorrectly, add some 301 rules on your site to harness that link juice
- https://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/bulk-http-header-compare/ - Check if the site is redirecting Googlebot specifically
- https://spyonweb.com/ - Any other domains connected you should know about? Mainly for duplicate content
- https://builtwith.com/ - Find out if the site is using Apache, IIS, PHP and you'll know which vulnerabilities to look for automatically
- Check for hidden text, CSS display:none funniness, robots.txt blocked external JS files, hacked / orphaned pages
My essential reports before I dive in:
- Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot)
- A report of everything in Google's index using the site: (1000 results per query unfortunately - this is how I do it)
Down to business...
Architecture Issues
1) Important broken links
We'll always have broken links here and there, and in an ideal world they would all work. Just make sure for SEO & usability that important links (homepage) are always in good shape. The following broken link is on webrevolve homepage that should be pointing to their blog, but returns a 404. This is an important link because it's a great feature and I definitely do want to read more of their content.
Fix: Get in there and point that link to the correct page which is https://www.webrevolve.com/our-blog/
How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report
2) Unnecessary Redirection
This happens a lot more than people like to believe. The problem is that when we 301 a page to a new home we often forget to correct the internal links pointing to the old page (the one with the 301 redirect).
This page https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure.html 301 redirects to https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html
However, they still have internal links pointing to the old page.
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?linkid=bankruptcy
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/category/credit-repair/page/10
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/collections.html
Fix: Get in that CMS and change the internal links to point to https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html
How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report
3) Multiple subdomains - Canonicalizing the www or non-www version
One of the first basic principles of SEO, and there are still tons of legacy sites that are tragically splitting their link authority by not using redirecting the www to non-www or vice versa.
Sorry to pick on you CVSports :S
- https://cvcsports.com/
- https://www.cvcsports.com/
Oh, and a couple more have got their way into Google's index that you should remove too:
- https://smtp.cvcsports.com/
- https://pop.cvcsports.com/
- https://mx1.cvcsports.com/
- https://ww.cvcsports.com/
- https://www.buildyourjacket.com/
- https://buildyourjacket.com/
Basically, you have 7 copies of your site in the index..
Fix: I recommend using www.cvcsports.com as the main page, and you should use your htaccess file to create 301 redirects for all of these subdomains to the main www site.
How did I find it? Google query "site:cvcsports.com -www" (I also set my results number to 100 for check through the index quicker)
4) Keeping URL structure consistent
It's important to note that this only becomes a problem when external links are pointing to the wrong URLs. *Almost* every back link is precious, and we want to ensure that we get maximum value from each one. Except we can control how we get linked to; without www, with capitals, or trailing slashes for example. Short of contacting the webmaster to change it, we can always employ 301 redirects to harness as much value as possible. The one place this shouldn't happen is on your own site.
We all know that www.example.com/CAPITALS is different to www.example.com/captials when it comes to external link juice. As good SEOs we typically combat human error by having permanent redirect rules to enforce only one version of a URL (ex. forcing lowercase), which may cause unnecessary redirects if someone links in contradiction to redirects.
Here are some examples from our sites:
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/rebuild-credit 301's to trailing slash version
- https://webrevolve.com/web-design-development/conversion-rate-optimisation/ Redirects to the www version
Fix: Determine your URL structure, should they all have trailing slashes, www, lowercase? Whatever you decide, be consistent and you can avoid future problems. Crawl your site, and fix these
Indexing & Crawling
1) Check for Penalties
None of our volunteers have any immediately noticeable penalties, so we can just move on. This is a 2 second check that you must do before trying to nitpick at other issues.
How did I do it? Google search queries for exact homepage URL and brand name. If it doesn't show up, you'll have to investigate further.
2) Canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, robots.txt
I always do this so I understand how clued up SEO-wise the developers are, and to gain more insight into the site. You wouldn't check for these tags in detail unless you had just cause (ex. A page that should be ranking isn't
I'm going to combine this section as it requires much more than just a quick look, especially on bigger sites. First and foremost check robots.txt and look through some of the blocked directories, try and determine why they are being blocked and which bots they are blocking them from. Next, get Screaming Frog in the mix as it's internal crawl report will automatically check each URL for Meta Data (noindex, header level nofollow & follow) and give you the canonical URL if there happens to be one.
If you're spot checking a site, the first thing you should do is understand what tags are in use and why they're using them.
Take Webrevolve for instance, they've chosen to NOINDEX,FOLLOW all of their blog author pages.
- https://www.webrevolve.com/author/tom/
- https://www.webrevolve.com/author/paul/
This is a guess but I think these pages don't provide much value, and are generally not worth seeing in search results. If these were valuable, traffic driving pages, I would suggest they remove NOINDEX but in this case I believe they've made the right choice.
They also implement self-serving canonical tags (yes I just made that up), basically each page will have a canonical tag that points to itself. I generally have no problem with this practice as it usually makes it easier for developers.
Example: https://www.webrevolve.com/our-work/websites/ecommerce/
3) Number of pages VS Number of pages indexed by Google
What we really want to know here is how many pages Google has indexed. There's 2 ways of doing this, using Google Webmaster Tools by submitting a sitemap you'll get stats back on how many URLs are actually in the index.
OR you can do it without having access but it's much less efficient. This is how I would check...
- Run a Screaming Frog Crawl (make sure you obey robots.txt)
- Do a site: query
- Get the *almost never accurate* results number and compare them to total pages in crawl
If the numbers aren't close, like CVCSports (206 pages vs 469 in the index) you probably want to look into it further.
I can tell you right now that CVCSports has 206 pages (not counting those that have been blocked by robots.txt). Just by doing this quickly I can tell there's something funny going on and I need to look deeper.
Just to cut to the chase, CVCsports has multiple copies of the domain on subdomains which is causing this.
Fix: It varies. You could have complicated problems, or it might just be as easy as using canonical, noindex, or 301 redirects. Don't be tempted to block the unwanted pages by robots.txt as this will not remove pages from the index, and will only prevent these pages from being crawled.
Duplicate Content & On Page SEO
Google's Panda update was definitely a game changer, and it caused massive losses for some sites. One of the easiest ways of avoiding at least part of Panda's destructive path is to avoid all duplicate content on your site.
1) Parameter based duplication
URL parameters like search= or keyword= often cause duplication unintentionally. Here's some examples:
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
Fix: Again, it varies. If I was giving general advice I would say use clean links in the first place - depending on the complexity of the site you might consider 301s, canonical tags or even NOINDEX. Either way, just get rid of them !
How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal Crawl > Hash tag column
Basically, Screaming Frog will create a unique hexadecimal number based on source code. If you have matching hash tags, you have duplicate source code (exact dupe content). Once you have your crawl ready, use excel to filter it out (complete instructions here).
2) Duplicate Text content
Having the same text on multiple pages shouldn't be a crime, but post Panda it's better to avoid it completely. I hate to disappoint here, but there's no exact science to finding duplicate text content.
Sorry CVCSports, you're up again ;)
https://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwwww.cvcsports.com%2F
Don't worry, we've already addressed your issues above, just use 301 redirects to get rid of these copies
Fix: Write unique content as much as possible. Or be cheap and stick it in an image, that works too.
How did I find it? I used https://www.copyscape.com, but you can also copy & paste text into Google search
3) Duplication caused by pagination
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3... You get the picture. Over time, sites can accumulate thousands if not millions of duplicate pages because of those nifty page links. I swear I've seen a site with 300 pages for one product page.
Our examples:
- https://cvcsports.com/blog?page=1
- https://cvcsports.com/blog?page=2
Another example?
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/23
- https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/22
Fix: General advice is to use the NOINDEX, FOLLOW directive. (This tells Google not to add this page to the index, but crawl through the page). An alternative might be to use the canonical tag but this all depends on the reason why pagination exists. For example, if you had a story that was separated across 3 pages, you definitely would want them all indexed. However, these example pages are pretty thin and *could* be considered as low quality for Google.
How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal links > Check for pagination parameters
Open up the pages and you'll quickly determine if they are auto generated, thin pages. Once you know the pagination parameter or structure of the URL you can check Google's index like so: site:example.com inurl:page=
Time's up! There's so much more I wish I could do, but I was strict about the 1 hour time limit. A big thank you to the brave volunteers who put their sites forward for this post. There was one site that just didn't make the cut, mainly because they've done a great job technically, and, um, I couldn't find any technical faults.
Now it's time for the community to take some shots at me!
- How did I do?
- What could I have done better?
- Any super awesome tools I forgot?
- Any additional tips for the volunteer sites?
Thanks for reading, you can reach me on Twitter @dsottimano if want to chat and share your secrets ;)
Hi Dave,
Interesting post, however there are a few more pointers that i would definitely consider as part of my audit which are as follows -
Technical Audit -
Please Note - Many people try to implement 301 redirect i.e. say www.abc.com/index.php >> 301 Redirect >> www.abc.com. This implementation in most cases will not work as it will result in a redierct loop.
Regarding Pagination, why not implement rel=prev and rel=next on the paginated pages. I have tested this at my end and they seem to work really well
Canonical tags should ideally be implemented when you have a dedicated "view all" page and you want the search engine spiders to give importance to that page.
Keep in mind that implementing canonical tags would result in substantial reduction in number of pages indexed.
Google Analytics Audit -
Webmaster Tools Audit -
- Sajeet
Really good addition Sajet, but considering the 60 minutes time limit David set to himself, I believe that these needed further analysis you add should be done in the "going deeper" tech audit of a site.
By the way, I'm really interested in your experience with and . Why don't you write a YouMoz to share your conclusions and, if you have, tips & tricks, do and don't.
Thanks Gianluca for the feedback, I was well aware of the 60 min clause, most of the pointers that i mentioned above is to identify certain problems that a website may or may not have. In fact pointers mentioned in Google Analytics Audit and WMT audit should not take lot of time. Even in the technical audit part, site search, alternate tags and checking home page redirects should not take lot of time. For others, detailed recommendations can be sent later.
One more point, I forgot to mention in the comments section was microformats. We can just have a look at the source code and see if microformats or microdata or RDFA has been implemented or not i.e. basic markup of Schema.org.
Regarding YOUMOZ, thanks for the suggestion, i would definitely consider it and hopefully i will be able to come up with a good post :-)
- Sajeet
Hi Sajeet, as Gianluca mentioned above, I stuck to a 60 minute time limit.
Your suggestions are fantastic, but I'm afraid there's no way I could do all of that in one hour.
But, I am inspired by your comment and I'm pretty sure I can build a tool to give a full technical snapshot in 60 seconds.
If I do build it, I'll share. Watch this space.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree with you when you say that all points cannot be covered in 60 minutes, but apart from the points that you mentioned, i think Google Analytics Audit and WMT Audit can be completed in the time frame of 60 min.
Please correct me of i am wrong.
- Sajeet
Yes, they definitely can be done in 60 minutes. However, I didn't have access to Analytics or GWT for these volunteer sites.
I did as much as I could externally in this particular post.
In fact, a WMT audit would have saved me loads of time :)
Sajeet, quick question - when you say you've implemented the rel=prev and rel=next pagination tags and it "has worked really well", what do you mean by that? How have you quantified that?
For their paginated series, my client is considering replacing their canonical tags with the rel=prev and rel=next tags per Google's recommendation. This will take time and effort, so I'm trying to help them weigh the benefits of making the switch.
Any quantifiable (or anecdotal) results you could share would be appreciated!
I add myself to the question. Actually that it was my Youmoz suggestion for you, but the comment system cut off the phrase.
Hi Tyler,
The Problem -
The biggest problem with pagination was the inability of search engine spiders to identify the paginated pages as a series. For any website that has thousands of pages and pagination in place, on checking Google WMT in the HTML suggestions section one would find loads of duplicate titles, duplicate meta description and duplicate meta keywords. The most ideal recommendation would be to implement optimized/unique titles and metas for individual pages of the series. However from a webmasters perspective it will be a huge operational hazard, especially in cases where pages get added very frequently.
The concept -
The purpose of these tags is very simple, they basically provide signals to search engine spiders about the paginated series. You can also read the blog post for detailed information and implementation.
When to implement the tags -
These tags would work very well say for a blog where these signals will help Google to identify the first page of the paginated series and ideally give importance to the first page. However if you consider an e-commerce website where there is a "View All" option then in such cases ideally one would want the View All page to be ranked by search engine spiders. In such cases canonical tag should be placed on the individual pages of the series pointing to the "View All" page.
Effect of these tags -
We implemented the tags on the pages and noticed that there was a sharp decline in the number of pages showing duplicate titles and duplicate Metas in the HTML suggestions section of Google WMT. This was followed by a sharp improvement in the rankings of the campaign keywords. In terms of statistics, we had around 600 paginated pages that showed duplicate elements in WMT, but after implementation that number was reduced to 176.
One would ask, why did the number of errors not reduce to zero, well there are "n" number of explanations ranging from the pages not getting crawled, delay in Google WMT data getting updated etc.
Lastly canonical tags or prev/next tags? it totally depends on your requirement and feasibility from an implementation point of view. If you want the "View All" section to rank then implement canonical tags, if you want the first page of the series to rank implement next/prev tags.
I Hope that I was able to answer your question.
Let me know in case you need any more help.
@Gianluca - I dont remember the last time you actually spelled my name correctly, btw I think with my two comments here, i have written my own mini Post :P
Cheers,
Sajeet
Great post followed by great comments, Sajeet - You rocked here. Thanks.
Thanks Robert, Really Appreciate it :)
- Sajeet
In July 2011 on one of my blogposts had summed up 20 questions, the answers to which would give an idea about the SEO progress of the site and would help the website owner take a quick audit of the site himself and make him look beyond rankings:
They were:
1. Does your business have a local presence.(Listings in Google Places And Google Maps)?
2. Does your company have a blog?
3. Do people read and comment on the blog posts?
4. Do the images from your website and blog get listed on the image search?
5. Have you uploaded videos about your products, company , etc. on YouTube or on your own server?
6. If you have videos on your server then has a video sitemap been submitted to Google?
7. Do the videos rank in SERPs and Video Option Search Results for the targeted keywords?
8. Which are the major 15-20 search queries (Head &Long Tail) for which the site ranks on Page 1?
9. Are these search queries directly related to your company, product or service?
10. Do people fill the form on your website to contact you?
11. Are these inbound mails from the site increasing?
12. On which country domains is your website ranking?Is this in sync with your geographic target?
13. Are the rankings stable for more than a quarter?
14. Does your website rank for branded and non-branded terms?
15. Does Your Website rank for local intent keywords on organic search (for e.g SEO Ahmedabad)
16. Do the page titles give an idea about what the page is about to the user?
17. Can the user share the content of the page easily to his social media site?
18. Do the images have Alt text which tell more about the image to the user?
19. Does the website have a sitemap for the user?
20. Is the content useful for the user and not stuffed with keywords by the SEO?
A must read and useful post - added to my favourites!
I like this tool for finding wrong pages and redirections, too (the tools is using SEOmoz Linkscapes API): https://www.virante.com/seo-tools/pagerank-recovery-tool
Nice tool, thanks for sharing!
me like mon :) thank you.
I agree - a must read. I will try using some of these tools and report back on how it went. Thanks for a thorough and extremely useful article. Joel. https://j3webmarketing.com/search-engine-optimization
Hey Dave,
I think that's a pretty thorough audit for 60-mins which covers a lot of the big issues. Thanks for the mention as well!
A quick tip if you're extra lazy for finding duplicate content in the spider - You can use the 'duplicate' filter under the 'URI' tab, we show any URI with matching hash values there.
Anyway, hopefully catch up at BrightonSEO / Linklove London :-)
Hi mate,
I try :) Did you see the comment above about .NET?
"With regards to hash tag of Screaming Frog, whilst this is a briliant idea, unfortunately this is no good for .NET sites since the same pages that show on two different URLs will have few lines of source code different, which are the <form action="..." etc line where action always contains the current URL, and also the hidden VIEWSTATE field."
Can your clever team get around this?
I missed that comment actually, thanks for pointing it out! It's correct, at the moment the pages have to be exact dups to be picked up. A single character difference in the source would be a different hash value etc.
And yes - we will be introducing something which does a better job at finding near duplicates in general, something we have wanted to roll out for a while :-)
What's the status of adding this new and improved duplicate content finder within the Screaming Frog SEO Spyder software? By the way: I absolutely love your software. I introduced it to my company and we have been using it ever since for many of our SEO needs.
For anyone interested, you can download Screaming Frog software here.
Nice post, Dave. My bread and butter is SEO site audits so I always enjoy seeing what others prioritize in their audits. For a 60 minute audit, I completely agree with your focus on important architectural issues such as indexing, canonicalization, and accessibility. Sajeet (in a comment above mine) lists a lot of great additions to an audit, but the important point for this post is the time limit. If you have more time, you can absolutely go crazy on many more aspects of a site (my full blown audits look at well over a hundred signals), but given a 60 minute cap, I think you nailed the priorities.
For super technical readers, I would like to add one thing to your duplicate text content section. Dupe detection has actually become a fairly mature area of research in the academic IR community, and if anyone is interested in learning algorithms that search engines use, this is a good resource: https://obuisson.free.fr/biblio/similarity_search_techniques/text_index/nearduplicates2006.pdf
Admittedly, most people don't need to worry about this topic at that level of detail. But if you're as crazy as me (and want to implement a Copyscape alternative), Henzinger's paper can point you in the right direction.
Hi Steve, thanks for that resource. You've ruined my Monday productivity ;)
Yes, I am as crazy as you and I'd love to see more dupe content checking automation in the future. I'm slowly but surely making my way through Python which I believe is going to get me a step closer to do this on scale.
Might be completely wrong though!
I'm glad I'm ruining productivity with something useful... as opposed to my usual shenanigans, which involve sending people links to ridiculous videos ;-)
Great post Dave. Golden nuggets in these posts! Thanks!
Its these kind of posts that are oh-so useful when it comes to hands-on SEO. Thanks!
Fantastic post, it's always revealing to look over the shoulders of others as they do stuff like this! Thanks for sharing!
What you actually do in the 60 minutes will of course depend on why you're undertaking the review in the first place. If you're trying to justify your services with a customer then understanding their goals/concerns can help target your review at the things that matter to them.
What do you do when you're getting through your audit and haven't found any significant problems!? Anyone encountered that scenario?
Yes, absolutely. When there aren't any problems you should look for opportunities - I guess I would start looking at:
All of the above can affect SEO, what would you do?
Yes, you definately have to start to throw the net a little wider and working out why they think they've got a problem can help narrow things down.
Asking the site owner/client what their expectation may reveal an unrealistic view. You never know, maybe there just arent' any more customers out there.
Yeah, I no longer even pay attention to the site:www.domain.com results for how many pages are indexed. I spent years pulling my hair out (as you can see from my profile picture) until I finally gave up on it. Now I’m bald :-( Thanks Google :-)
Google webmaster tools will tell you about all the pages indexed in their engine as well as many other useful pieces of information when you use and submit sitemaps. It will tell you about pages errors and codes and if you also happen to have a news sitemap, it will tell you what pages were indexed and why the other pages weren’t indexed. Such as too short, not enough content, even what it perceives as no content.
Nice job, great post thanks.
Oh man, thanks for that laugh :)
Yes, those results are usually flawed but a big gap *might* signal that something's wrong. It's never going to be exact, but if you see double or even triple the amount of results you should check, just in case ;)
Dave really a wonderful post its really important to find out Technical Flaws as fast as possible and to find them in just 60 minutes is really very very fast. Your post is just a best material which can improve our working efficiency as it is very important to stand out of the crowd.
I am feeling really great that from now I can serve my clients with the best technical audit report within the least time of just 1 Hour.Thanks to you mate.
What a nice comment :)
Although you can find some faults in an hour, you're more likely to spot things that are worth investigating further - that's when I usually go crazy and spend my entire day researching.
Take this list, build on it and show me up!
Great info for those at all levels :-))
In regards to -
3) Duplication caused by pagination I was in control of a website with over 5 million pages, by virtue of an online dating website. As you could imagine with nearly 2.5k new member sign ups per/day the page duplication was insane at one point until we identified the issue.
This advice is prob relevant to larger sites, in which case the SEO team would have access to be able to set title tag parameters by calling the database.
While we thought we had good URL architecture in place (which was true), when we looked into webmaster tools & the duplicate title tags was insaneeee. Millions in fact.
So as I stated above, we had the ability to call the database and set title tag parameters based on information we wanted used in the title tag.
Scenario being:
Before: <domain_name>/MemberProfile/Location/Gender/ProfileID
After: <domain_name>/MemberProfile/Location/Gender_Age/Profile_Name
The key change here, was to include the "Exact" profile name in the title tag which would make every page title unique.
Prob most relevant to larger sites, but often something that gets overlooked even by the best of us!!
Once again, thanks for a great article! :-))
Hey James,
Well done in solving your issue. I've recently had the same problem but my scale was close to the billions :S
Thanks for sharing
Nice one Dave. Good actionable tips, I'll make a checklist based on your post and will be using it when starting work on every new site.
Great to go back to basics and remind ourselves of the on-site factors that can really make a great difference in ones ranking. Thanks Dave.
OK Dave, my socks are officially blown off. Very good post.
*finds blown off socks, gives them back to BigFish22* :)
Nice post!
A small point: as is the consensus, Google considers the layout of your page in terms of deciding which bits are important and so on. I had an issue with our blog: https://www.talksolarpanels.co.uk/blog where it displayed totally fine in Chrome, Firefox and the latest Internet Explorer, as well as various older versions. However, the cached version of the page in Google showed a screenshot of the page in the preview view with the page's display totally messed up, so I've just changed the CSS to make sure it works fine (it turned out for very, very old versions of IE there was an issue with the CSS, but it seems that's how Google interprets the page at least for their cached view)
Moral: double check that the cached versions of your main pages in the preview mode (ie hovering over the result in a search) look ok, as it's probably quite important!
Great going Dave, really informative post and one I'll probably come back to again and again. Getting started is the hardest part of any audit, there are so many options and directions to take. By narrowing down some important architectural points you've distilled the process down to a good starting hour.
Next time: you're on your way to a new client who wants a SEO audit. You forgot to look at their website and you've got 10 minutes before the taxi gets there. You open up your laptop, what do you spend your time on?
That's a great shout. The sad (or good?) thing is that I often come across the question, "what do you do for a living". I say SEO and somehow, someway I get roped into doing mini site audits for strangers.
Being the nice guy that I am, I usually look through their site in an hour and feed back to them.
Hi mate some good tips and advice to do a quick wins audit. I agree with all the sections you have put into the quick audit. Another important point I include on my site audits is action lists and prority on tasks so teams can work towards fixing the problems asap.
Also thanks for the help the other week with that blog issue mate.
Hi mate, no worries :) A priority list / action sheet is crucial, you're absolutely right and I should have included it as a download for these sites.
Great article, and checks achievable in 1 hour. I would add two small comments:
Regarding number of indexed URLs, I would actually use *both* methods (looking at sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools to see how many URLs are in index) and also site: operator since they give slightly different picture.
- The first one (GWT sitemap) tells you how many are indexed out of URLs that *should* be indexed.
- The second one (site: operator) tells you (a bit skewed) number of how many URLs are in G. index. These URLs may or may not be the ones that are in sitemap that should be indexed.
With regards to hash tag of Screaming Frog, whilst this is a briliant idea, unfortunately this is no good for .NET sites since the same pages that show on two different URLs will have few lines of source code different, which are the <form action="..." etc line where action always contains the current URL, and also the hidden VIEWSTATE field.
Thanks for the information on .net sites, going to check that out today.
Dan (from Screaming Frog) has commented on this post, maybe he might be able to figure out a clever solution for us?
Great post, tried a few things, already took more than an hour, but never the less, thanks for to tips.
Q: If I change the phsical file names of my pages in expression web, will it break the links on my site or will it automatically adapt the changes???
Great post ! ! !
Hey, I'm going to be 100% honest and say that I've never seen expression web before! I'm very interested and curious now, so thanks for bringing it up (https://www.microsoft.com/expression/)
Although I can't answer your question... apologies.
This post was indeed an edge for every folks who' s been working as a freelancer by which needs it badly to somehow boost their skills and be an effectibe blogger. I had even bookmark the site so that I can have sme referrences that I think I really need for my projects.
This is some really great stuff. Lots of nuggets to be found here. Fantastic!
Great Article. Sometimes it can be very difficult to stick to a time constraint. I applaud your efforts in helping us all with a little time management.
Thanks for the post! I am still getting confused with the canonical duplicate content issue and keep revisiting a number of my sites to double check.
Very good post and some very helpful comments and suggestions, many thanks.
Its a best guide ever to check the website progress in a very limited time because due to the excess of work it becomes very much harder to check the website status and progress but you make it easy for everyone by offering 60 minute audit for checking each aspect of the website.Thanks!
Brilliant, thank you so much for sharing this x
Thanks for sharing awesome tricks!
Thank you!
The spyonweb.com is an interesting and handy tool, interesting to see how visible sites are which are owned by the same person / business. Although the data is sometimes out of date.
For sixty minutes its more than enough, and I would like to ask the SEOMoz staff to give a link of this post in other posts which has mentionings of Screaming frog crawler.
e.g:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-tools-that-rock
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog
etc etc!
Nice article Dave, I think your method for a 60 minute check on your website is very sound, and I think all levels of experience could easily follow your audit. I do however think that Sarjeet had a point that if a site does have GWT installed this is one of the qucikest methods to get an overview of your sites technical health. As gfiorelli quite rightly says maybe a follow up article in relation to Analytics and GWT? How would you supplement your 60 minute strategy with access to GWT if at all?
If I had GWT tools access, I could probably cut down 20-30 minutes off my time. I think the biggest benefit for me is the paramter handling section so I can quickly discover automated duplication.
Glad to know all the subtilities and technicalities of search engine optimization. The content was very informative looking for a content that can entails all the bad practices that we search engine optimizers do during the whole process of optimization and link building!
Great post with some solid tips and advice! A must read!!
I have never used Screaming Frog and to be honest I am reluctant to use another tool. Has anyone else tried it out. If it is good then glad to investigate it but the blog post reads like a promotion for it which is fine if it is IS worth it.
Not meaning to be mean but would love to know what it brings to the party over the other tools that I use.
I guess my first question is what tools do you currently use? If you've built your own crawler than you probably won't be using any readily available tools.
Most SEOs use XENU, IIS SEO Crawler and Seomoz Campaigns - but the new kid on the block (screaming frog) has been very well received by the SEO community. Sorry if the post sounded promotional, but it truly isn't. Like any good piece of software it deserves appropriate recognition and that's exactly what I'm doing here.
Not to say you can't accomplish a site audit without Screaming Frog, but right now it's hands down my favourite pick up and go technical seo tool.
Regex crawling, user agent switching, optional robots directive obeying, custom filters for specifics in source code and much more.
I'll bet you that you'll love it. We've talked about it a few times on Seomoz here:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-tools-that-rock
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog
Thanks for your comment.
No big deal I wasn't being critical (not sure if there is a cricical bone in my body to be honest). I have Pro membership here and don't use it enough but scared to leave :-) and I think that using that suite of tools well with Webmaster should take up enough hours in the day.
I will give Screaming Frog a peek - not today or tomorrow but clipped to Evernote - and see if it can help. I think such tools are when you are at the bleeding edge as in you are really trying to juggle mutliple ideas and get ahead ina tight niched keyword battle against another eager SEO with similar approaches.
Most people who I do some SEO for don't actually need bleeding edge and in fact I wouldn't even call it SEO most of the time more like "Look fix this the dogs on the street have this in place"
Also need to find time to go back to my own site which is in real need of an SEO audit from content alone knowing that if I spent 4-5 hours at it it would yield me some ranking right away.
First of all I would really like to thank you for this wonderful post Dave. I believe you have listed all the important resources and their URLs that one can use to find the flaws in a website. Having said that I would like to ask you for any help that you can provide with regarding a technical difficulty that I a facing on one of my blogs. Some of my posts are appearing on more than one category. This is causing a 'duplicate content' issue in my Google Webmaster account. What do I do to solve this? Should I simply disallow google bot to index my Category page or is their any other way to do this? Could you please help me out here.
Hi Harald,
I see you have a PRO account, which entitles you to ask questions in PRO Q&A. Would you mind submitting your problem with a full explanation (as well as what platform you're using, ex. wordpress, joomla) and one of the Moz associates can take a good look for you.
Thanks for your comment :)
Very nice and useful article!
This provides a nice overview of the workflow in any SEO project.
I have the screaming frog tool downloaded but not yet investigated it until now
You have a mistake on the link https://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwwww.cvcsports.com%2F
It should be www.cvcsports.com not wwww.cvcsports.com
Thank you.