Technical SEO
Audit fundamental technical SEO factors that affect crawlability and indexability.
1. Canonical URL
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
<link rel="canonical"> missing |
⚠️ WARN "Add canonical to prevent duplicate content" |
Canonical present but empty href |
❌ FAIL |
| Canonical points to a different domain | ⚠️ WARN "Cross-domain canonical — verify this is intentional" |
| Canonical is relative (not absolute URL) | ⚠️ WARN "Use absolute URLs for canonical tags" |
| Canonical present and valid | ✅ PASS |
| Multiple canonical tags | ❌ FAIL "Only one canonical allowed per page" |
| Canonical is self-referencing | ✅ PASS (best practice) |
2. Robots meta
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> |
⚠️ WARN "Page will not appear in search results" |
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> |
⚠️ WARN "Links on this page will not be followed" |
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> |
⚠️ WARN "Page excluded from search entirely" |
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> or absent |
✅ PASS "Page is indexable" |
<meta name="googlebot"> present |
✅ PASS — report its content |
3. Robots.txt references
Check if the page references or is affected by robots.txt:
- Look for
<meta name="robots">directives - If analysing a full site, check
robots.txtat site root for: Disallowrules that block the current pageSitemapdirective pointing to sitemap locationCrawl-delaydirectives (may slow indexing)
4. Sitemap references
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
<link rel="sitemap"> present |
✅ PASS |
| No sitemap reference found | ⚠️ WARN "Consider adding sitemap reference" |
If sitemap URL is available, verify:
- Valid XML format
- Contains the current page URL
- No URLs returning 4xx/5xx status codes
5. URL structure
Analyse the page URL (from <link rel="canonical"> or <meta property="og:url">):
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
| URL contains uppercase letters | ⚠️ WARN "Use lowercase-only URLs" |
| URL contains underscores | ⚠️ WARN "Use hyphens instead of underscores" |
URL contains special characters or spaces (encoded %20) |
⚠️ WARN "Simplify URL structure" |
| URL exceeds 100 characters | ⚠️ WARN "Keep URLs concise" |
URL has double slashes (//path) |
❌ FAIL "Fix double slashes" |
| URL has trailing slash inconsistency | ⚠️ WARN "Be consistent with trailing slashes" |
| Clean, descriptive, lowercase with hyphens | ✅ PASS |
6. HTTP status hints
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=..."> present |
⚠️ WARN "Use 301 redirects instead of meta refresh" |
Page contains window.location redirect in inline script |
⚠️ WARN "JS redirects are not SEO-friendly" |
7. Indexability checklist
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
Has <title> tag |
Required for indexing |
Has <meta name="description"> |
Required for SERP snippets |
Has unique content (not empty <body>) |
Required |
Not blocked by noindex |
Required |
| Has canonical URL | Recommended |
| Is HTTPS (check canonical/og:url) | ⚠️ WARN if HTTP |
8. Pagination
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
<link rel="prev"> / <link rel="next"> present |
✅ PASS "Pagination properly marked" |
| Paginated content without prev/next | ⚠️ WARN "Add for multi-page content" |
9. Duplicate content signals
| Check | Status |
|---|---|
Same <title> as canonical page but different URL |
⚠️ WARN |
| No canonical + URL has query parameters | ⚠️ WARN "URL parameters may create duplicate pages" |
| Multiple pages with identical meta description | ⚠️ WARN |
Edge cases
- Next.js app router generates canonical tags automatically via the
metadataexport — audit the rendered HTML output robots.txtmay not be accessible if auditing a single HTML file — note this limitation and skip robots.txt checks- Pages behind authentication (login walls) may intentionally use
noindex— flag as ⚠️ WARN but note context - Single-page applications with client-side routing may have a single canonical URL for all "pages" — flag as ⚠️ WARN
- Staging/preview environments often have
noindex— distinguish between intentional and accidental noindex when possible - Pages with
rel="prev"/rel="next"are deprecated by Google (since 2019) but still supported by Bing — note as informational, not FAIL
