The Technical SEO (& Beyond) Site Audit Checklist - Moz

The Technical SEO (and Beyond) Site Audit Checklist

For SEO Agencies, Consultants, and Website Owners

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction

A free, downloadable SEO audit spreadsheet

Can this page rank? Does it meet or exceed minimum technical SEO requirements?

These are questions asked over and over again by SEO professionals, consultants, and website owners. Seasoned professionals typically have a quick list of technical SEO items to check off when looking to solve ranking and indexing issues. Likewise, agencies and consultants often perform in-depth technical SEO audits, sometimes running hundreds of pages, to help improve the search visibility of their clients.

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Here, we provide you with a free on-page technical SEO audit that's both quick and easy, and yet covers all the important areas around indexing, ranking, and visibility in Google search results based upon our years of in-depth SEO knowledge in the industry.

This audit spreadsheet is downloadable and you can modify it for your own purposes. If you're an agency or consultant, you can incorporate it into your own audit process, or if you're a website owner, you can quickly check the important SEO elements of your own site.

To get started, simply click the button below to make a copy for yourself.

Download the site audit checklist

Instructions

  1. Download a copy of this sheet.
  2. The list assumes you are auditing a single URL, but you can use automation to scale this out by site.
  3. Each audit point is marked with a level of importance: High, Medium, Low, and N/A. Feel free to modify these values based on your individual needs.
  4. As you work through the audit, you can mark each item with Pass, Fail, or N/A.
  5. Use the "Notes" section to write down any important observations you find, or points that need further clarification.
  6. Use the "Action Items" column to document the next steps for you and/or your client to take.
  7. For further information about each audit item, check the "Reference" column.

Below, you can find an explanation of each audit point, along with recommended tools and techniques to examine each point.

How much of this guide do I need to read?

If you're serious about improving your technical SEO knowledge and improving you website at the same time, we recommend reading the entire Technical SEO Checklist. We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.

Go through at the pace that suits you best, and be sure to take note of the dozens of resources we link to throughout the chapters — they're also worthy of your attention.

If you want to take a more organized approach to learning technical SEO or training your entire team, check out the Moz Academy Technical SEO Certification. We've consolidated all the resources you need to learn how to confidently implement a competitive analysis strategy with unique learning strategies, task lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge. You can also display your knowledge with your Linkedin Moz SEO Essentials certification badge.

Technical SEO Certification

Learn all about technical SEO with on-demand videos and task lessons, test your knowledge with exams at the end of each section, and top it all off with shiny new credentials to share with your professional network.

1. Basics

While technically not part of the audit itself, these are simple checklist items to help deliver the best data, gain access to additional tools, and in most cases, make the auditing process a hundred times easier.

Analytics installed

While having analytics installed isn't an actual ranking factor, having an analytics package can deliver a ton of visitor and technical information about your site. Most webmasters install Google Analytics, but for those with privacy or performance concerns, there exists a wealth of great alternatives.

Tools: Google Analytics

Search engine properties set up

Setting up a website property in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools (and sometimes Yandex) can provide a wealth of information about how these search engines crawl your site. Many of the additional steps in this checklist are vastly easier with access to these tools. Additionally, these tools often give you direct access to specific tools and settings which assist your site with rankings and visibility, such as sitemap submission or international targeting.

Tools: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools

Recommended: Run a site crawl

If you're auditing only a single page, nearly everything on this checklist can be audited manually by hand, using various tools and an hour or two of your time. That said, if you want to audit multiple pages at once, or scale your process, it's typically helpful to run a site crawl across your entire site.

Most major SEO toolsets offer site crawl/audit capabilities, and they can often reveal issues not uncovered via traditional analytics or Search Console properties.

Tools: Most SEO toolsets, Moz Pro

Free site audit webinar

Listen & learn about how a comprehensive audit can improve your site's ability to rank and earn valuable engagement.

2. Crawling & indexing

Here we begin the juicy good part of the audit to answer two very basic yet important questions: are search engines crawling your site and indexing your important content?

URL is indexed

Perhaps the most important item of the entire checklist: does the URL actually appear on Google (or the search engine of your choice)? To answer this question, SEOs typically perform one of two very quick checks.

1. Do a site: search

A "site:" search is perhaps the quickest and easiest way to see if a URL is indexed. Simply type "site:" followed by the URL. For example:

site:https://moz.com/blog/performance-metrics-beta

2. Search Console "Inspect URL"

The problem with using "site:" search is that it returns everything starting with the URL pattern you enter, so it can return multiple URLs that match the string. For this reason, it's often better to look up the exact URL using the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console.

In fact, this method is preferred because the URL Inspection Tool will help you complete other audit items on this checklist.

Tools: URL Inspection Tool

Important content indexed

While it's important that search engines can index your URL, you also want to make sure that they can index your actual content. Although not completely foolproof, one quick way is to simply examine Google's cache of the URL. You can perform that with the following code, replacing "example.com" with your URL.

https://google.com/search?q=cache:https://example.com/

If you can't remember the code, the MozBar contains a quick link to Google's cache. It's a good idea to keep the MozBar handy, as it can help with several other items in your audit.

Tools: MozBar

Note: At this point, if you've verified that your important content is indeed indexed by Google, you may not need to spend a huge amount of time digging into the indexation issues below. That said, as more pages are added at scale, these issues become increasingly important to check, and it's always good to spend a few minutes to verify.

Returns a 200 status code

At a page level, if you want search engines to index a URL, it generally needs to return a 200 HTTP response status code. Obviously, you want to avoid 4xx and 5xx errors. A 3xx redirect code is less lethal, but it typically means the URL you're auditing isn't the one that's going to rank.

Tools: MozBar, Link Redirect Trace, httpsstatus.io

Indexable by robots meta tag and X-robots-tag

If you see indexation issues, you want to do a quick check to make sure the page isn't marked with a robots "noindex" directive. A lack of a robots directive is fine, as the default is "index."

Most of the time, robots directives are placed in the HTML as a meta robots tag. Far less often, they are placed in the HTTP header as a X-robots-tag. You are free to check both places, but Google's URL Inspection report will quickly tell you if indexation is allowed.

Note: If the URL is not indexed, use the "Test Live URL" in Search Console to check indexability status.

Tools: Google Search Console, MozBar

URL not blocked by robots.txt file

While Google can still index a URL that's blocked by robots.txt, it can't actually crawl the content on the page. And blocking via robots.txt is often enough to keep the URL out of Google's index altogether.

If the URL is simple, you might get away with a quick visual inspection of your robots.txt file. In most cases, you'll likely want to do a more thorough check of the URL using one of the tools listed below.

Tools: Google Robots.txt Tester, Robots.txt Validator and Testing Tool

URL listed in XML sitemap file

Technically, listing URLs in a XML sitemap file isn't required for ranking in Google, but it can make discovering your URLs by search engines a whole lot easier, and in some cases, can help with crawling and even ranking (it doesn't rank if it never gets crawled.)

Best practice is to have all your indexable URLs listed in an XML sitemap or multiple sitemap files.

Learn more: XML Sitemaps: The Most Misunderstood Tool in the SEO's Toolbox

Sitemap file location defined in robots.txt

Okay, so you've verified that your URL is listed in an XML sitemap. Next, you want to ensure that search engines — all search engines — can easily find your sitemap files.

The easiest and most straightforward way to accomplish this is to simply list your sitemap location in your robots.txt file. Placing your sitemap here works for all major search engines, and doesn't require any extra work. The disadvantage of this method is that it potentially exposes your sitemap to third-party crawlers, so in some cases you may not want to use it, and employ direct search engine submission (listed below) instead.

Check out Moz's robots.txt file to see an example of this in action.

Learn more: Technical Robots.txt Syntax

Sitemap file submitted to search engines

Even if your sitemap is listed in your robots.txt file, you'll still want to make sure to submit your XML sitemaps directly to search engines. This ensures that:

  1. The search engines actually know about your XML sitemap
  2. The search engines will report if they found the sitemaps valid
  3. Finally, you can get a coverage report from the search engines with statistics about how they crawled and indexed the URLs found in your sitemap

Both Bing and Google support direct sitemap submission. Google offers particular value in this area because after you submit a sitemap, you can check out Google's Index Coverage Report for each individual sitemap submitted.

Tools: Google Sitemaps Report, Bing Webmaster Sitemaps

URL is discoverable via internal links/navigation

Sitemaps are one way search engines use to discover pages on your site, but the primary way remains by crawling webpages and following links.

Typically, your high-priority pages should be discoverable within 4–5 clicks of the homepage. This is part of your site architecture.

You also want to avoid " orphaned pages" — which are pages not linked to by any internal URLs on your site.

The process for discovering orphaned pages isn't quite so simple. SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb do a decent job finding orphaned pages but require connecting to other data sources — such as sitemaps — in order to discover them. In truth, a URL that doesn't want to be found can be very difficult to find if it isn't linked to or listed anywhere.

The best way to avoid orphaned pages is to simply ensure that important pages are linked to, either via navigation or other internal links. Search Console and many SEO link tools may provide limited reporting on internal linking, but often the solution involves a more manual check.

Content is available at a single, canonicalized URL

Ah, our good friend canonicalization. We could write many, many posts on canonicalization, and we have. Suffice to say, there are a few basic guidelines you want to keep in mind when thinking about canonicalization and duplicate content.

1. All URLs should have a canonical tag

2. Different URLs with the exact same content should point to the same canonical URL. Additionally, URL parameters that don't change a page's content shouldn't change the canonical tag. For example:

https://example.com?parameter=same-content

Would likely have a canonical like this:

<link href="https://example.com/" rel="canonical">

3. Different URL patterns should lead to the same content: e.g.

Ideally, 3 out of the 4 would redirect to the "canonical" version — whichever URL pattern is correct — via 301 redirects.

You can perform a simple canonicalization check using the MozBar. Simply navigate to a URL and first verify that the page contains a self-referencing canonical. Next, try adding random parameters to the URL (ones that don't change the page content) and verify that the canonical tag doesn't change.

Note: While the most common place to signal canonicals is within the HTML, you can also place them in the HTTP header .

Tools: MozBar

Identify pages with missing canonical tags

in Moz Pro Site Crawl

Fix canonical tags

Google-selected canonical matches user-selected canonical

Here's the scary news: simply because you've defined your canonical, doesn't mean Google will respect it. Google uses many signals for canonicalization, and the actual canonical tag is only one of them. Other canonical signals Google looks at include redirects, URL patterns, links, and more.

To figure out if Google respects your user-defined canonical, Search Console is the best tool for the job. Use the Coverage Report of Search Console's URL Inspection Tool to identify instances when Google chooses a different canonical than the one you selected.

You can also find a bulk report of canonicalization errors in the "Excluded" Coverage Report, labeled "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user."

Tools: Google Search Console

No canonical/indexation mixed signal errors

This one is pretty simple. You want to avoid sending mixed signals between your canonical tags and indexation tags.

For example: if Page A canonicals to Page B, and Page B is indexable, you don't want to put a "noindex" tag on Page A, as this would send mixed signals.

In short, if a URL is indexable, don't canonicalize "noindexed" pages to it.

Tools: MozBar

Friendly URL structure

A general rule of thumb is to keep your URLs as simple as possible. Typically this means:

It's also important to keep in mind that Google may use your URL to create breadcrumbs for your snippet in search results, so using simple, keyword-rich URLs can help with your click-through rate as well.

To learn more, Google has good documentation surrounding URL structures.

Content can be rendered with basic JavaScript

If you've made it this far, and you've already verified that Google is indeed already indexing your important content, you likely don't have any JavaScript rendering issues. That said, if you do experience a problem in these areas and your site relies on JavaScript, it may be the culprit.

The two simple tools to test if Google can render your site with basic JavaScript are Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and the "Test Live URL" function in Google's URL Inspection Tool in Search Console. Select "View Rendered Page" in Search Console to view the rendered DOM, JavaScript Console Messages, and resource loading errors.

Debugging JavaScript errors is a big subject beyond the scope of this checklist, but at least now you know where to start.

Learn more:

Important CSS, JS, and images not blocked by robots.txt

If search engines can't render your page, it's possible it's because your robots.txt file blocks important resources. Years ago, SEOs regularly blocked Google from crawling JavaScript files because at the time, Google didn't render much JavaScript and they felt it was a waste of crawling. Today, Google needs to access all of these files to render and "see" your page like a human.

The best practice is to visually inspect your robots.txt file and make sure you don't block any important image files, CSS, or JavaScript files that would prevent search engines from rendering your page. You can also use Google's URL Inspection Tool to discover any blocked resources, as shown here.

Note: It's perfectly fine if some JavaScript or CSS is blocked by robots.txt if it's not important to render the page. Blocked third-party scripts, such as in the example above, should be no cause for concern.

Tools: URL Inspection Tool

3. Meta and structured data

Here we look at your meta and structured data — the "behind-the-scenes" information that doesn't display on the page, but may help search engines understand your content, influence how you show up in search results, and may even help you to rank higher.

Page contains a title element

Finally, an easy one!

Your URL should contain a single title tag, with text describing your page. Fortunately, missing or empty title tags are really easy to discover:

If your title is missing or empty, be sure to add it in!

Tools: MozBar

Title contains important keywords visible in first 60 characters

A common question we get A LOT here at Moz is: "How long should my title tag be?"

The answer, of course, is it depends. Google confirms that titles can be very long. Traditionally, most SEOs recommend keeping your title to 55–60 characters, as that's the limit of what Google typically displays in search results (based on pixel length.)

Longer titles can also be problematic because they're often comprised of boiler-plate, parts of titles that repeat over and over again across different sections of your site, which Google recommends against.

Regardless of your title length, it's a good idea to keep your important keywords in the first 60 characters, where users can actually see them in search results. Keeping your important keywords in the visible part of your title can have a significant impact on click-through rates (CTR).

Tools: Title Tag Preview Tool

Title tag is unique

Whew, another point about title tags again. They must be important!

The final check of your title tag is to make sure that it's not duplicated across your site. While there's no known ranking penalty for duplicate titles, Google both encourages the use of unique titles and discourages repetitive boilerplate. Unique titles can help search engines differentiate your content, and can help identify your unique value to users.

Most SEO crawlers can easily identify duplicate title errors.

If you want to only check a single page, an easy way is to combine Google's site: and intitle: operators to search for exact match titles on your site, like this:

site:moz.com intitle:"Moz - SEO Software for Smarter Marketing"

Which gives you a result like this. Hopefully, you only see one result.

Contains unique meta description

Honestly, it sometimes can be a little hard to get enthusiastic about meta descriptions when the data shows that Google ignores our meta descriptions 63% of the time.

That said, descriptions remain important because Google will use them if they believe your description is superior to what they can pull from the page, and a good description can also help with CTR.

But… if Google detects duplicate descriptions, they indicate that they are much less likely to use them.

Because detecting duplicate descriptions isn't easy to do manually, it's typically done with an SEO crawler.

Favicon defined

A few years ago, you'd never find anything about favicons in an SEO audit. To be fair, most people still overlook them. Regardless, favicons are important because Google displays them next to your snippet in mobile search results, as in this example below.

Having a clear favicon that stands out may influence your organic CTR.

Typically, you can tell if your site has a favicon defined by simply looking at the browser tab.

To be double-sure, you want to make sure sure the favicon is defined on the homepage of your site with the following code:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">

Learn more: Define a favicon to show in search results

OG and social metadata

To be clear: marking up your content with Open Graph and social metadata (such as Twitter cards) will not impact your Google rankings one bit. But social meta tags do influence how your content shows up on social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, and more, which can influence how your content is shared, linked to, and can ultimately influence your rankings downstream.

Most modern CMS systems allow you to easily define OG and other social metadata, and even define defaults for these values, so it's best not to leave them blank.

A handy list of social debugging links we use at Moz:

  1. Twitter Card Validator
  2. Facebook Sharing Debugger
  3. Linkedin Post Inspector
  4. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator

These tools are often handy when you need to update a social image (or other data) and need to clear the cache to update what gets displayed on the social site.

Tools: SEO Meta in 1 Click

Structured markup

First, a few Q&As about Rich Snippet Markup:

  1. Is structured data, by itself, a ranking factor? No.
  2. Can structured data help me to rank? Yes, it can help Google to understand the content of your page.
  3. Can structured data influence CTR? Yes, Google supports several types of rich snippets based on structured data.

These days, nearly every URL should have some sort of structured data that supports Google rich snippets. Whether it's as simple as article markup, identifying an author and/or an organization, product reviews, or even recipe markup, you should strive to be as clear and detailed in your structured data as possible.

While exactly how much Google uses structured data is open to debate, it's fair to say they definitely support the data types listed in their structured data Search Gallery.

To validate your structured data, try the tool below.

Tools: Google Rich Results Test, Google Structured Data Testing Tool

Uses max-image-preview:large setting

Here's one you won't find in most SEO audits, and it involves Google Discover.

Many SEOs have found Google Discover to be a great source of traffic, but earning the coveted spots can be elusive.

Google defines no special requirements for Google Discover inclusion, except for general advice about descriptive headlines and the use of large images. Google recommends using images at least 1200px wide, and enabled by the "max-image-preview:large" setting, which is shown in this code snippet:

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">

Alternatively, the page can be served with AMP. To be fair, Google can likely figure out your images without this meta tag, but it's a good idea to include it nonetheless.

Learn more: The Ultimate Checklist to Optimize Content for Google Discover

4. Content

Now let's examine the content of the page. Many of these items don't strictly fall under the area of "technical SEO" but they can cause significant ranking issues if not addressed.

Content isn't substantially duplicate

While Google won't penalize you for duplicate content, duplicate pages typically get filtered out of search results as Google strives to " show pages with distinct information."

Small amounts of duplicate content on a page are natural and often don't present a problem, but when the majority of your content is "substantially similar" to other content found on the internet, or on your own site, it can cause issues.

While we've previously discussed solving duplicate content issues on your own site with canonicalization, noindex tags, and robots.txt control, it's also helpful to make sure you've discovered the duplicate content that exists both on your site, and possibly across the web as well.

Three different ways to find duplicate content:

  1. Run a site crawl using the SEO tool of your choice.
  2. For a single page, use Google's exact match search operator — by wrapping a portion of the "page text in quotes" — to find duplicate content. For example, if we search for the opening sentence to Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO, we can see how it's been copied around the web.
  3. Copyscape, a free plagiarism detector.

While it's not uncommon to find your content duplicated across the web, it's typically not a problem, unless those sites outrank you. In these cases, you may want to file a DMCA Complaint. Even better, you can ask the offending sites to link to you as the source of the original content or add a cross-domain canonical.

Content organized with hierarchical HTML tags

Should your page use a single h1 tag? How many h2s should you use?

In reality, Google doesn't care how you organize your page, as long as you make your structure clear. Typically, this means ordering your content with headings in a hierarchical fashion. Most SEO studies show a strong relationship between the use of headings and Google rankings, so we recommend using headings to organize your content in a smart, logical way.

via Logical Content Flow

Additionally, a single h1 is still recommended for accessibility, so it's a good idea if your headline follows this rule.

Tools: Logical Content Flow

Content is keyword-targeted

For years, keyword targeting has been the basis for many SEO site audits. While Google today is much more sophisticated about how it understands what pages are about, it's still a good idea to check that your page includes target keywords and related phrases in key places:

Of course, you also want to check at this stage for keyword stuffing, and avoid it.

You can utilize the Page Optimization feature in Moz Pro (included as part of your free trial) to discover opportunities to optimize your pages for specific keywords, as well as see related keyword and topic suggestions. Simply navigate to the Page Optimization tab and enter the URL/keyword combo you want to rank for.

The score will change over time as you fix issues and incorporate suggestions.

Learn more: On-Page Keyword Optimization

Content doesn't violate Google's Quality Guidelines

Experienced SEOs can often tell at a glance if content is spammy or if it deserves a shot at ranking. As part of the audit process, it's a good idea to make sure the page meets minimum quality of standards in that it doesn't violate Google's Quality Guidelines.

Most of Google's list is obvious stuff, but worth a double-check. Things like:

You can find the full list of Google's Quality Guidelines here.

Avoids intrusive interstitials

Popups and banners that get in the way of content are a common feature of websites, especially on mobile.

Unfortunately, these "intrusive interstitials" can also cause a site to rank lower.

Popups for legal reasons (e.g. cookie consent) and those that only take up a small amount of space typically aren't a cause for concern. That said, if your mobile URL greets you with a giant advertising banner that fills the screen, this is likely something you want to flag.

Avoids heavy ads above the fold

Heavy ads above the fold is another area that Google may penalize you for if they find the ads distract too much from your content.

Like intrusive interstitials, it's best to take a look at your page in a mobile browser to inspect how easy it is to get to your main content. If this task is made more difficult by a heavy ad presence, you likely want to mark it in your audit and experiment with reducing the top-of-page ad flow.

Content isn't loaded in an iFrame

Loading content in an iFrame can be tricky from a technical SEO point of view, and Google generally recommends against it.

Typically what happens when you use an iFrame is that Google "flattens" the iFrame with your content and considers it a part of the content itself. While this generally works, it can become problematic if the iFrame doesn't load, or Google has trouble accessing the iFrame.

In short, sometimes it's necessary or convenient to use iFrames, but you should avoid them whenever possible.

Learn more: Rich media file best practices

Content isn't loaded in Flash

Flash is dead. If your content relies on Flash, your rankings may be dead too.

If your page still uses Flash, most browsers (including Chrome) will simply ignore it.

To audit Flash, Search Console's Mobile Usability Report will report if your site uses "incompatible plugins" including Flash.

Lazy-loaded content is visible in the ViewPort

Lazy-loading has become more popular, especially since native browser support. Many CMS frameworks, including WordPress, now incorporate lazy-loading of images by default.

When lazy-loading works correctly, images (or other content) come into view when needed in the viewport (the visible part of your web browser.) When things go wrong, content isn't loaded correctly and isn't visible to search engines.

The easiest way to audit lazy-loaded content is simply to use Google's URL Inspection Tool. After inspecting a page, check the screenshot and the HTML to make sure all images loaded correctly. For the more technical-minded, Google offers a Puppeteer script using headless Chrome.

Supports paginated loading for infinite scroll

Like lazy-loading, infinite scroll can be good for user experience, but not-so-great for search engines. When set up incorrectly, it can hide information from Google.

The correct way to implement infinite scroll is with paginated loading, which means the URL changes as the visitor scrolls down the page. You can check out an example here. This allows users to share and bookmark specific pages of your content, as well as allows search engines to index individual sections of your content. Google recommends signaling your paginated loading using the History API, which tells the browser when to update the displayed URL as the user scrolls.

Learn more: Support paginated loading for infinite scroll

Current publication and updated dates

Adding a publication date to your content isn't likely to impact your rankings directly, but it can have a strong influence on both your CTR and user engagement signals. Google directly displays dates in search results, which can affect user clicks.

If you choose to display dates, many SEOs choose to display the last modified or last updated date, to show readers that the content is fresh and relevant. For example, instead of saying "Published On" you could say "Last Updated" - as long as the information is true. Google knows when you actually updated your content, so you won't fool them if you try.

A few general guidelines about displaying accurate dates:

  1. Display a visible date for the user, typically near the top of the page.
  2. Include " datePublished" and " dateModified" properties in your Schema markup.
  3. Keep dates consistent. For example, multiple dates on the page could confuse Google

Learn more: How to provide date information to Google

Clear who the author and/or publisher is

Authorship is a touchy subject in the SEO space.

While Google doesn't confirm authorship as a ranking factor, they do confirm tracking authorship information as entities, and working to not only determine the author of a page but also connect that author to other works on the web.

Furthermore, Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines supports this by encouraging raters to go to great lengths to determine the reputation of the author and/or publisher. Content by anonymous or low-reputation authors/publishers is often rated "Low" quality, while content from high-reputation author/publishers is often rated "High" or "Highest."

Typically, Google can figure out who the author and publisher of a given piece are, but it's best practices to help them connect the dots. A few tips:

  1. For specific authors, make sure the author is clearly printed on the page
  2. Include author data in your Schema markup
  3. Link your author to an author profile page, which in turn links to social media profiles and other articles by the same author
  4. Include "publisher" markup in your Article Schema (or other types of schema)
  5. Make your publisher and contact information clear on your About Us and Contact pages

Content doesn't trigger Google Safe Search filters

Millions of users use Chrome's "SafeSearch" filters, which keep explicit content, like pornography, out of their search results.

Most of the time, the system works great.

Occasionally, Google may flag a site as having explicit content, when none exists. This can sometimes happen when Google gets confused by your content.

If you have any doubt at all that your site may trigger Google's SafeSearch, it's best to do a manual check:

  1. Turn on SafeSearch in your own browser
  2. Do a site: search of your website homepage and a few specific directories
  3. Turn off SafeSearch and repeat the searches
  4. If the number of results is substantially different, your site may be filtered by SafeSearch

If your site does not host adult or sensitive content and you believe SafeSearch is filtering your content in error, you can report the problem to Google.

Learn more: Google SafeSearch and SEO

5. Links & navigation

Links are crawlable

You might be surprised, but there are many, many ways to create web links.

Some are good for SEO. Others, not so much.

In order for a link to be crawlable, search engines typically need an tag with an href attribute. And yes, lots of developers create links without these attributes.

A quick way to see if your links are crawlable (and followed) is to use the MozBar to highlight all crawlable links on the page, as demonstrated below.

Learn more: Make Your Links Crawlable

Page doesn't link to broken pages (404)

Pages break. The web is literally littered with 404s. It's a natural part of the ecosystem. If you happen to link to a 404, it typically doesn't represent a big SEO problem.

That said, links leading to 404s can be bad in that:

Fixing broken links works better when you do it at scale, and your efforts may be more greatly rewarded when you prioritize internal links. If you have a very large site, hunting down and fixing every 404 may be a low ROI effort, though the ROI rises with the importance of each page.

Most SEO crawlers can identify broken links and 404s. If you simply want to audit a single page, many Chrome extensions such as Broken Link Checker can easily handle the job.

Links use descriptive anchor text

Links with relevant anchor text typically pass more value.

Google uses anchor text as a ranking signal, and patent filings suggest it may even ignore links with irrelevant or generic anchor text.

Finally, Google typically frowns on "over-optimization" which can include linking with too many exact-match anchors, so it's good to mix things up.

Examples of good anchors:

Examples of generic anchors:

To audit the outgoing links on a single page, you can use the MozBar to highlight all internal and external links and make sure your anchor text is descriptive.

Links are qualified when appropriate (nofollow, ugc, sponsored)

Not long ago, Google changed how they handle nofollow linking.

Today, Google treats nofollow links as a "hint" — meaning they may in fact crawl them and count them for ranking purposes.

Google also introduced two new link attributes:

  1. " ugc" to indicate user-generated content
  2. " sponsored" to indicated sponsored links

These attributes, along with nofollow, can help protect you as a publisher. Since Google can penalize sites that link to spam or links that give a financial incentive, marking these links appropriately can help you avoid Google's wrath.

Learn more: Qualify your outbound links to Google

Faceted navigation doesn't lead to duplicate content

Faceted navigation can work great for shoppers, allowing them to narrow down their selection with nearly infinite choices.

Those same nearly infinite choices can create nearly infinite pages for Google to crawl if you aren't careful.

If every option in your faceted navigation is linked in a way that creates a new URL every time, in a way that doesn't substantively change the content, you could inadvertently create millions of duplicate or near-duplicate pages for Google to crawl.

A few best practices for faceted navigation:

  1. Don't create clickable elements for options that don't exist or change the page content
  2. Nofollow unimportant options and block crawling in robots.txt
  3. Use either noindex or canonicalization for URLs you want to keep out of the index
  4. Use Google Search Console's Parameter tool to define parameter settings.

Learn more: Faceted navigation for SEO best practices

Execute a Technical SEO Audit Like a Pro [Webinar]

Join Moz's SEO Manager, Kavi Kardos, to discover tactics you'll employ to make your site more efficient, effective, and enjoyable to use. She'll break down the major aspects of technical SEO — crawling, indexation, site performance, and accessibility — with the help of our Site Audit checklist.

Paginated pages are clearly linked

If your site uses pagination, it's important that your paginated links are visible to search engines.

Google recently depreciated support for rel=prev/next markup, though other search engines continue to use it. This means that the primary way Google finds paginated content is through links on your page.

In general, paginated pages should be clearly linked and crawlable. Paginated pages themselves should be self-canonicalized or canonicalized to a "view all" page containing all entries.

There are lots of details and traps to fall into when dealing with pagination. If interested, we highly recommend this article by Ahref's Patrick Stox on dealing with pagination.

Page does not contain an excessive amount of links

In the old days, Google recommended no more than 100 links on a page. Those days are long gone, and today Google can process many multiples of that without challenge.

That said, even though Google can crawl several hundred links (or more) per page, there are still valid reasons to limit the number of options you present to search engines. A high number of links dilutes the link equity every link passes and can make it harder for Google to determine which links are important.

While there's no magic number as to the number of links that's reasonable, if you find every page of your site has hundreds — or thousands — of links, you may consider trimming them down to better focus your link equity and how Google crawls your site.

Finally, Google is known to devalue sitewide and/or boilerplate links, so if you have footer navigation with the same 500 links on every page, it might be valuable to experiment with new linking practices.

Page does not link to redirect chains

Similar to our advice about not linking to broken 404 pages, it's often helpful to check your outgoing links for redirects and redirect chains.

Pages move frequently on the web, and over time these moves can lead to redirect chains that are truly quite impressive. Google has stated they will follow up to 5 redirects per attempt — and they may make many attempts to eventually discover the final URL.

Redirect Chains via Moz Pro. Start your free trial now!

To be clear, this is typically a minor issue and one you needn't lose a lot of sleep over. Fixing redirect chains reduces the chance of crawling errors and, as such, can help preserve link equity. On the other hand, a small number of 3xx redirects is completely normal, and fixing these likely won't produce large gains.

Gain critical insight into site performance

Research and track page performance to gain critical insight into Core Web Vitals like cumulative layout shift, total blocking time, and more

Check your Performance Metrics

6. Images

Did you know that if Google's image search was its own search engine, it would account for over 20% of the total search engine market share?

Regardless, ranking in image search isn't the only reason to optimize your images, as images can play an important part in your overall SEO.

Images contain descriptive alt attributes

Generally, images need alt attributes for 3 primary reasons:

  1. Alt attributes help search engines to understand the image
  2. For images that link to another URL, the alt attribute acts as the link's anchor text
  3. Accessibility: screen readers and other applications rely on alt text to properly understand the page

To be fair, fixing a missing alt text or two (or three) likely isn't going to move the SEO needle very much, but at scale and when applied consistently, descriptive alt text can help Google add content to your page and imagery, as well as help you rank.

Keep your alt text concise but descriptive. The best alt texts are those that would make the most sense to one using a screen reader who couldn't actually see the picture.

<img src="pupdanceparty.gif" alt="Puppies dancing">

Learn more: Alt Text, Examples and Best Practices

Image heights and widths are defined

While defining image heights and widths isn't a direct Google ranking factor, the lack of image dimensions can cause usability issues as a browser tries to load the page.

This leads to Cumulative Layout Shift which can impact your Core Web Vitals score, which in turn can harm your rankings.

Because layout shift is really the important issue here, it's best to run a speed audit of your site using something like Google's Page Speed Insights, and see what your CLS score reflects. If it's low, there's a good chance you have images without defined dimensions.

There are many ways to define image dimensions. For a good overview, we recommend this article at web.dev.

Use descriptive titles, captions, filenames, and text for images

In addition to alt text, Google uses many other signals to determine what an image is about, and how it relates to your content. These signals include:

Ideally, and for maximum visibility, each of these elements is defined, descriptive, and unique.

Most of the time, the #1 element folks neglect is the filename. A human-readable filename, one that ideally uses descriptive keywords, is the way to go.

Poor filename:

/590k9985x-9974-Screen-Shot-2021-05-22-at-6.36.00-PM.jpg

Better filename:

/my-new-puppy.jpg

Images don't contain important text

While Google has gotten much better at understanding text embedded in images in recent years, you still shouldn't rely on them to index any image text on your page.

An all-too-common mistake is for inexperienced web designers to place text in images, without understanding that the text is nearly invisible to search engines.

If your images do contain important text, make sure that the same information is communicated either in the alt text, captions, titles, or surrounding body text.

Images are listed in image sitemaps

For better discoverability and indexing by search engines, it's helpful to list images in a sitemap file, or an image sitemap file specifically for images, which might look like this:

A few things to note about image sitemaps:

  1. Unlike regular sitemap URLs, image sitemap URLs can be on another domain entirely, which allows for CDNs.
  2. Each URL entry can list up to 1,000 images.
  3. Image sitemaps can contain a number of optional entries such as caption, title, license, and geo-location.

Learn more: Image Sitemaps

7. Video

Some days, it may seem like YouTube is the only game in town, but Google does index and rank videos from millions of different sites. For maximum visibility, there are a few best practices you'll want to follow.

Video is available on a public, indexable page

This is kind of a no-brainer, but it's not always obvious. Google doesn't rank videos by themselves but instead ranks your pages that actually host the video where they are embedded.

This means that the video needs to appear on a public, indexable URL.

Additionally, the URL of the video itself must be accessible by Google on a stable URL, not blocked by robots.txt or any other means.

For example, you can directly access one of our Whiteboard Friday videos here. It's a stable URL that Google can access, but it's not a publicly indexable page. On the other hand, our actual Whiteboard Friday page that embeds the video is both public and indexable, so this is the page that Google would rank.

Video is wrapped within an appropriate HTML tag

A small but simple point: when you embed your video, make sure Google can identify it as a video by wrapping it in an appropriate HTML tag. Acceptable tags are: