Technical SEO Issues That PeekSEO Catches
PeekSEO identifies a wide range of technical SEO issues that can impact your website's performance in search results.
Errors
These issues can significantly impact your site's SEO performance
Broken internal image
Broken internal images waste crawl budget and bandwidth. Search engines may view pages with broken images as lower quality, potentially affecting rankings. This can lead to higher bounce rates, which are indirect ranking factors.
Broken internal link
Broken internal links waste crawl budget as search engines attempt to follow dead links. They can lead to lost opportunities for search engines to index your pages and may indicate poor site maintenance, negatively impacting quality signals.
Duplicate description
Duplicate meta descriptions occur when multiple pages use the same or similar meta description tags. Search engines may only display one version of your site in search results, potentially hiding other relevant pages.
Duplicate title
Duplicate title tags occur when multiple pages use the same or similar title tags. Search engines may only index one version of your site, potentially hiding other relevant pages.
Meta refresh
Meta refresh automatically redirects users to another page after a specified time. Search engines prefer standard redirects (301 or 302). Meta refreshes may be flagged as potential spam and can create confusion in the indexing process.
Missing title
A <title> tag is a key on-page SEO element that appears in search results. If missing, Google may consider the page low quality. You will miss chances to rank high and gain a higher click-through rate in search results.
Missing viewport
The viewport meta tag controls how your page is displayed on mobile devices. Since mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, missing viewport tags can negatively impact your search rankings, especially for mobile searches.
4xx error
4xx errors indicate that the requested page cannot be found or accessed. These errors waste your site's crawl budget as search engines attempt to index non-existent pages, potentially affecting your site's overall crawlability.
5xx error
5xx errors refer to server problems that prevent users and search engine robots from accessing your webpages. This negatively affects crawlability and can lead to a drop in traffic driven to your website.
Warnings
These issues should be addressed to improve your site's SEO
Broken external image
Broken external images link to non-existent resources on other domains. While not as critical as broken internal images, they waste bandwidth and can make your site appear unprofessional to search engines.
Broken external link
Broken external links point to non-existent pages on other websites. They waste your site's crawl budget as search engines attempt to follow these dead links, potentially affecting your site's performance.
Duplicated H1 and title
When your page's H1 heading and title tag are identical, you're missing an opportunity to provide additional context to search engines. Having slightly different H1 and title tags can help target different search intents.
Missing alt text
Alt text provides a text alternative for images, which is essential for SEO. Without alt text, search engines cannot properly index your visual content, potentially missing opportunities for image search traffic.
Missing description
Meta descriptions provide a summary of a webpage's content. While not a direct ranking factor, they significantly impact click-through rates. Without one, search engines will generate one from your page content, which may not be optimal.
Missing doctype
The DOCTYPE declaration tells browsers which version of HTML your page is using. Missing DOCTYPE can lead to inconsistent rendering, which may trigger quirks mode. While not a direct SEO factor, proper HTML structure helps indexing.
Missing H1 tag
The H1 tag is the highest-level heading on your page and helps search engines understand the main topic. Without an H1, you're missing an opportunity to clearly communicate your page's primary focus to search engines.
Temporary redirect
A temporary redirect (HTTP 302) indicates that a page has been moved temporarily. Using temporary redirects for long-term changes can waste your site's crawl budget. For permanent moves, use a 301 redirect to transfer SEO value.
Informational Issues
These issues provide insights for optimization
Long description
Meta descriptions that exceed the recommended length (around 155-160 characters) may be truncated in search results.
Long title
Title tags that exceed the recommended length (around 50-60 characters) may be truncated in search results.
Multiple H1 tags
Having multiple H1 tags on a page can dilute the signal about your page's main topic. While modern HTML5 allows multiple H1 tags, search engines may still give more weight to the first H1 they encounter.
Permanent redirect
A permanent redirect (HTTP 301) indicates that a page has been permanently moved to a new URL. This properly transfers SEO value to the new URL, maintaining your site's SEO value.
Underscore in URL
URLs containing underscores (_) instead of hyphens (-) may be treated differently by some search engines. While Google generally treats them similarly, using hyphens is considered the best practice for URL structure.