SEMRush Site Audit SEO Glossary & Issue Descriptions

• What is a canonical tag?
  • A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. Practically speaking, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.
• Why does canonicalization matter?
  • Duplicate content is a complicated subject, but when search engines crawl many URLs with identical (or very similar) content, it can cause a number of SEO problems. First, if search crawlers have to wade through too much duplicate content, they may miss some of your unique content. Second, large-scale duplication may dilute your ranking ability. Finally, even if your content does rank, search engines may pick the wrong URL as the “original.” Using canonicalization helps you control your duplicate content.
• Simplified explanation:
  • A tag on a page that designates the master copy and should only be used on duplicate pages to tell Google which one is the master copy
    • Ex: www.yourdomain.com vs yourdomain.com (one should be the master)

• What is robots.txt?
  • Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website. The robots.txt file is part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users. The REP also includes directives like meta robots, as well as page-, subdirectory-, or site-wide instructions for how search engines should treat links (such as “follow” or “nofollow”).
  • In practice, robots.txt files indicate whether certain user agents (web-crawling software) can or cannot crawl parts of a website. These crawl instructions are specified by “disallowing” or “allowing” the behavior of certain (or all) user agents.
  • Basic format:
    • User-agent: [user-agent name]
    • Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]
• Simplified explanation:
  • A file that we create that tells Google which pages are good to crawl :) and which are bad to crawl :(. Must be in the proper format.
• MORE INFO

• What is a sitemap?
  • A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.
• Do I need a Sitemap?
  • You don’t HAVE to have one, but you should unless your site is perfect and no one’s really is
• Simplified explanation:
  • A list of pages and media on your site
• MORE INFO

• What is JavaScript?
  • JavaScript is a logic-based programming language that can be used to modify website content and make it behave in different ways in response to a user’s actions. Common uses for JavaScript include confirmation boxes, calls-to-action, and adding new identities to existing information.
  • One example of JavaScript in action is boxes that pop up on your screen. Think about the last time you entered your information into an online form and a confirmation box popped up, asking you to press OK or Cancel to proceed. That was made possible because of JavaScript — in the code, you’d find an “if … else …” statement that tells the computer to do one thing if the user clicks OK, and a different thing if the user clicks Cancel.
• Simplified explanation:
  • Makes websites functional like pop up boxes, pressing ok buttons
• MORE INFO

• What is internal JavaScript?
  • In order for JavaScript code to work its magic, it must somehow be incorporated in the proper location on a particular web page as the page is loaded. Internal JavaScript code is code that’s placed anywhere within the web page between the HTML tags. Many web developers choose to place their JavaScript code before the tag.
• MORE INFO
• Simplified explanation:
  • Internal JavaScript code is code that’s placed anywhere within the web page between the HTML tags

• What is external JavaScript?
  • Javascript code placed in a file separate from the HTML code is called external JavaScript. External JavaScript code is written and used in the same way as internal JavaScript. The file should have the “.js” extension, although virtually any other extension works with modern browsers. One important difference: The external code must not be placed between thetags, or the code will not work.
• Simplified explanation:
  • External JavaScript code is placed in a file separate from the HTML code

• What is CSS?
  • CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. This programming language dictates how the HTML elements of a website should actually appear on the front end of the page.
• Simplified explanation:
  • Makes websites’ front-end look pretty. If HTML is the drywall, CSS is the paint.
• MORE INFO

• What are internal links?
  • Internal links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source).
• Simplified explanation:
  • an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website.
• MORE INFO

• What are external links?
  • External links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source).
• Simplified explanation:
  • If another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. Similarly, if you link out to another website, this is also considered an external link.
• MORE INFO

• What are orphaned pages?
  • Pages that are not linked to from anywhere on your site and as a result, cannot be found by a googlesearch bot unless it is linked to externally (from someone else’s site). It can occur deliberately (when a webmaster creates a “private” page to show to someone but not to public, for example) or accidentally (in this case it’s a web development/ design mistake).
• Simplified explanation:
  • A page that is not linked to from anywhere on the site, so Google can’t find it and crawl it and neither can your users.
• MORE INFO

• What is HSTS Policy?
  • The HSTS policy forces all responses to pass through HTTPS connections instead of plain text HTTP. This ensures that the entire channel is encrypted before any data is sent, making it impossible for attackers to read or modify the data in transit.
• Simplified explanation:
  • We need this to work for security purposes
• MORE INFO

• What is HREFlang?
  • The hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x") tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language.
  • The hreflang attribute allows you to show search engines what the relationship is between web pages in alternate languages. It’s useful when you’ve created content that’s specific to a local audience. The hreflang attribute adds a signal to search engines that a user querying in language “x” will want this result instead of a page with similar content in language “y”.
• Simplified explanation:
  • A tag that tells Google what language the user speaks so they can translate the page into the correct version
• MORE INFO

• What is an HTTP status code?
  • An HTTP status code is a server response to a browser’s request. When you visit a website, your browser sends a request to the site’s server, and the server then responds to the browser’s request with a three-digit code: the HTTP status code.
• Simplified explanation:
  • The status that a page is, it could be 200, 301, 302, 404, 500. Some are good, some are bad.
• MORE INFO
• 200 HTTP Status Code
  • This is your ideal status code for your normal, everyday, properly functioning page. Visitors, bots, and link equity pass through linked pages like a dream. You don’t need to do anything and you can happily go about your day secure in the knowledge that everything is just as it should be.
• 404 HTTP Status Code
  • This means the file or page that the browser is requesting wasn’t found by the server. 404s don’t indicate whether the missing page or resource is missing permanently or only temporarily. You can see what this looks like on your site by typing in a URL that doesn’t exist. It’s like hitting a brick wall. Just as you’ve experienced, your visitors will hit a page that has a 404 error and either try again (if you’re lucky) or wander away to another site that has the information they’re seeking.
  • Every site will have some pages that return 404 status codes.
• 410 Gone
  • A 410 is more permanent than a 404; it means that the page is gone. The page is no longer available from the server and no forwarding address has been set up. Any links you have on your site that are pointing to a 410 page are sending bots and visitors to a dead resource, so if you see them, remove any references or links to them from your content.
• 500 Internal Server Error HTTP Status Code
  • Instead of the problem being with pages missing or not found, this status code indicates a problem with the server. A 500 is a classic server error and will affect access to your site. Human visitors and bots alike will be lost, and your link equity will go nowhere fast. Search engines prefer sites that are well maintained, so you’ll want to investigate these status codes and get these fixed as soon as you encounter them.
• 503 Service Unavailable
  • Another variety of the 500, a 503 response means that the server is unavailable. Everyone (human or otherwise) is asked to come back later. This could be due to temporarily overloading the server or maintenance of the server. A 503 status code ensures that the search engines know to come back soon because the page or site is only going to be down for a short time.

• What is a temporary (302) redirect?
  • 302 Found (HTTP 1.1) / Moved Temporarily (HTTP 1.0) are often how this shows up in a crawl, a 302 temporary redirect is a temporary change and redirects users and search engines to the desired page for a limited amount of time until it is removed.
• Why do we use them?
  • In SEO, we try not to use these and always permanently redirect something. BUT you could use them if a product went out of stock temporarily, if a page is being worked on and there is another page with similar information, etc.
• Simplified explanation:
  • When a redirect link is temporarily redirected instead of permanently redirected. The status of the page would be a 302. But the user would be redirected to another designated page. Usually we want to make 302’s 301’s so we can pass along any SEO rankings or authority to a new page.
• MORE INFO

• What is a permanent OR 301 redirect?
  • A 301 redirect is used to make sure that search engines and users are sent to the correct page. A 301 status code is used when any page has been permanently moved to another location.
• Scenarios of use:
  • Links to any outdated URLs need to be sent to your desired page. A case in point would be the merging of two websites.
  • There are several URLs used to access your site. Select a single URL as a canonical and preferred destination and use your 301 redirects to direct traffic to the preferred or new URL.
  • You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition to your new site as seamless as possible.
  • You removed a tour or activity or changed it and want to redirect a user to a new page instead
• In SEO these are important because if a page ranks well for something, and the page needs to be redirected, a permanent 301 redirect will pass on any rankings or page authority or link juice from the old page to the new page.
• Simplified explanation:
  • A way to permanently redirect a page to a new one. This way all of the SEO (including page authority, rankings, etc) is transferred to the new page. Does not always transfer and rank automatically as google has to find the redirect and crawl the page it is redirected to.
• MORE INFO

About this issue: If you’re running a multilingual website, it is necessary to help users from other countries find your content in the language that is most appropriate for them. This is where the hreflang (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") attribute comes in handy. This attribute helps search engines understand which page should be shown to visitors based on their location. It is very important to properly synchronize your hreflang attributes within your page’s source code, otherwise you may experience unexpected search engine behavior. For more information, see this article from Google.

How to fix it: To avoid any conflicts, we recommend that you review your hreflang attributes within your page’s source code and fix any of the following issues:

• Conflicting hreflang and rel=canonical URLs
• Conflicting hreflang URLs
• No self-referencing hreflang URLs

See 500 error definitions

• About this issue: No title tags on the page
• How to fix it: Add title tags

• About this issue: Pages on your site have the same title tags
• How to fix it: Make each title tag unique

• About this issue: Pages have duplicate content, google frowns upon this because each page should have unique content
• How to fix it: Create unique, engaging content for each page.

• About this issue: See internal link definition
• How to fix it: Fix the internal links

• Bunch of different reasons this could happen, they could be noindexed or no followed try recrawling them. Basically a Googlebot crawler couldn’t access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response.

• About this issue: A DNS resolution error is reported when crawler can’t resolve the hostname when trying to access your webpage.
• How to fix it: Please contact your web hosting technical support and ask them to investigate and fix the issue.

• About this issue: This issue is reported when crawler fails to access a page because of an invalid page URL.
  • Common mistakes include the following:
    • Invalid URL syntax (e.g., no or an invalid protocol is specified, backslashes () are used)
    • Spelling mistakes
    • Unnecessary additional characters
• How to fix it: Make sure your page’s URL conforms to a standard scheme and doesn’t have any unnecessary characters or typos.

• About this issue: An internal broken image is an image that can’t be displayed because it no longer exists, its URL is misspelled, or because the file path is not valid. Broken images may jeopardize your search rankings because they provide a poor user experience and signal to search engines that your page is low quality.
• How to fix it: Replace all broken images or delete them.

• About this issue: Pages have duplicate descriptions, google frowns upon this as each page should have a unique meta description.
• How to fix it: Create unique meta descriptions for each page

• The robots txt file has to be set up a certain way and in a certain language, set up their GSC and see what errors are occuring
• Fix this by reviewing the robots.txt file for errors
• About this issue: If your robots.txt file is poorly configured, it can lead to disastrous results. One mistake can damage your search rankings, ruining all your search engine optimization efforts.
• How to fix it: Fix this by reviewing the robots.txt file for errors. See this article by Google for more information.

• About this issue: If your sitemap.xml file has any errors, search engines will not be able to process the data it contains, and they will ignore it.
• How to fix it: Review your sitemap.xml file and fix all errors.
• For information on how to configure your sitemap.xml, please see this article.

• About this issue:
  • A sitemap.xml file makes it easier for crawlers to discover the pages on your website. Only good pages intended for your visitors should be included in your sitemap.xml file.
  • This error is triggered if your sitemap.xml contains URLs leading to webpages with the same content. Populating your file with such URLs will confuse search engine robots as to which URL they should index and prioritize in search results. Most likely, search engines will index only one of those URLs, and this URL may not be the one you’d like to be promoted in search results.

• How to fix it:

  • Review your sitemap.xml for any URLs pointing to copies of original webpages, and remove all of them except the one you’d like to be recognized by search engines as the preferred version.

• The www version of the page isn’t resolving. Would have to check with webmaster/developer.

• About this issue: The viewport meta tag is an HTML tag that allows you to control a page’s viewport size and scale on mobile devices. This tag is indispensable if you want to make your website accessible and optimized for mobile devices.
• How to fix it: Set the viewport meta tag for each page.

• Note: tread lightly if they are on a FH site, maybe nothing we can do about it.
• About this issue: A webpage’s HTML size is the size of all HTML code contained on it. A page size that is too large (i.e., exceeding 2 MB) leads to a slower page load time, resulting in a poor user experience and a lower search engine ranking.
• How to fix it: Review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and/or removing inline scripts and styles.

• About this issue:
  • Accelerated Mobile Page. This issue is triggered if your AMP page has no canonical tag. When creating AMP pages, several requirements should be met:
    • If you have both an AMP and a non-AMP version of the same page, you should place canonical tags on both versions to prevent duplicate content issues
    • If you have only an AMP version of your webpage, it must have a self-referential canonical tag For more information, please see this Google article
• How to fix it: Add a rel=”canonical” tag in the section of each AMP page.

• About this issue: See hreflang definition above
• How to fix it:
  • Make sure that your hreflang attributes are used correctly. Here are a few ways to avoid hreflang implementation issues:
    • Specify the correct language code
    • Specify the correct country code
    • Use hyphens to separate language and country values
    • Precede a country code with a language code
    • Do not use a country code alone

• See 404 definition in glossary

• About this issue: An HREFLANG (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") attribute helps search engines understand which page should be shown to visitors based on their location. Utilizing this attribute is necessary if you’re running a multilingual website and would like to help users from other countries find your content in the language that is most appropriate for them. It is very important to make sure your pages don’t have any hreflang link issues, otherwise search engines will not be able to interpret them correctly and, as a result, will not show the correct language version of your pages to the relevant audience.
• How to fix it: To avoid any problems with hreflang links, we recommend that you review your hreflang attributes and do the following:
  • Fix broken HREFLANG URLs
  • Fix HREFLANG redirects
  • Replace relative URLs with absolute ones

• Pages that are not protected by HTTPS and are still HTTP. Update the SSL certificate and permanently 301 redirect the old version of the page to the secure HTTPS version.

• About this issue: Talking about the SSL certificate. If you allow your certificate to expire, users accessing your website will be presented with a warning message, which usually stops them from going further and may lead to a drop in your organic search traffic.
• How to fix it: ask your website administrator to renew the certificate and run periodic checks to avoid any future issues.

• About this issue: Running SSL or old TLS protocol (version 1.0) is a security risk, which is why it is strongly recommended that you implement the newest protocol versions.
• How to fix it: Update your security protocol to the latest version.

• About this issue: If the domain name to which your SSL certificate is registered doesn’t match the name displayed in the address bar, web browsers will block users from visiting your website by showing them a name mismatch error, and this will in turn negatively affect your organic search traffic.
• How to fix it: Contact your website administrator and ask them to install the correct certificate.

• About this issue: If your website contains any elements that are not secured with HTTPS, this may lead to security issues. Moreover, browsers will warn users about loading unsecure content, and this may negatively affect user experience and reduce their confidence in your website.
• How to fix it: Only embed HTTPS content on HTTPS pages.

• About this issue: If you’re running both HTTP and HTTPS versions of your homepage, it is very important to make sure that their coexistence doesn’t impede your SEO. Search engines are not able to figure out which page to index and which one to prioritize in search results. As a result, you may experience a lot of problems, including pages competing with each other, traffic loss and poor placement in search results. To avoid these issues, you must instruct search engines to only index the HTTPS version.
• How to fix it: Do either of the following:
  • Redirect your HTTP page to the HTTPS version via a 301 redirect
  • Mark up your HTTPS version as the preferred one by adding a rel=”canonical” to your HTTP pages

• About this issue:
  • Redirecting one URL to another is appropriate in many situations. However, if redirects are done incorrectly, it can lead to disastrous results. Two common examples of improper redirect usage are redirect chains and loops.
  • Long redirect chains and infinite loops lead to a number of problems that can damage your SEO efforts. They make it difficult for search engines to crawl your site, which affects your crawl budget usage and how well your webpages are indexed, slows down your site’s load speed, and, as a result, may have a negative impact on your rankings and user experience.
  • Please note that if you can’t spot a redirect chain with your browser, but it is reported in your Site Audit report, your website probably responds to crawlers’ and browsers’ requests differently, and you still need to fix the issue.
• How to fix it:
  • The best way to avoid any issues is to follow one general rule: do not use more than three redirects in a chain.
  • If you are already experiencing issues with long redirect chains or loops, we recommend that you redirect each URL in the chain to your final destination page.
  • We do not recommend that you simply remove redirects for intermediate pages as there can be other links pointing to your removed URLs, and, as a result, you may end up with 404 errors.

• About this issue:
  • In order for AMP pages to be served properly to mobile users, they must be compliant with AMP guidelines.
  • If your HTML doesn’t adhere to AMP standards, your AMP page will not work correctly and may not be indexed by search engines, and, as a result, may not appear in mobile search results.
• How to fix it:
  • Since there are multiple reasons why your page’s HTML may not comply with AMP standards, we provide specific how-to-fix tips for each invalid AMP page. These tips are provided in the ‘Issue Description’ column on the page that lists all pages with HTML issues.

• About this issue: In order for AMP pages to be served properly to mobile users, they must be compliant with AMP guidelines. If the style and layout of your AMP page do not adhere to AMP standards, the page will not work correctly and may not be indexed by search engines, and, as a result, may not appear in mobile search results.
• How to fix it: Since there are multiple reasons why your page’s style and layout may not comply with AMP standards, we provide specific how-to-fix tips for each invalid AMP page. These tips are provided in the ‘Issue Description’ column on the page that lists all pages with style and layout issues.

• About this issue: In order for AMP pages to be served properly to mobile users, they must be compliant with AMP guidelines. If your AMP page includes templating syntax, it will not work correctly and may not be indexed by search engines, and, as a result, may not appear in mobile search results.
• How to fix it: Since there are different types of templating issues that your AMP page can have, we provide specific how-to-fix tips for each invalid AMP page. These tips are provided in the ‘Issue Description’ column on the page that lists all pages with templating issues.

• Solved on a page by page basis. See canonical definition.

• Solved on a page by page basis. Should only be one canonical URL per page, see canonical definition.

• Meta refresh happens when a user is on a page for a designated amount of time, not necessarily bad to have them unless the page is constantly broken and just needs to be fixed.
• About this issue: A meta refresh tag instructs a web browser to redirect a user to a different page after a given interval. Generally, it is recommended that you avoid using a meta refresh tag as it is considered a poor, slow and outdated technique that may lead to SEO and usability issues.
• How to fix it: Review all pages with a meta refresh tag. If this tag is used to redirect an old page to a new one, replace it with a 301 redirect.

• Note: see definition in glossary
• About this issue: A broken JavaScript or CSS file is an issue that should be watched out for on your website. Any script that has stopped running on your website may jeopardize your rankings, since search engines will not be able to properly render and index your webpages. Moreover, broken JS and CSS files may cause website errors, and this will certainly spoil your user experience.
• How to fix it: Review all broken JavaScript and CSS files hosted on your website and fix any issues.

• About this issue: This issue is triggered when our audit tool connects to your web server and detect that it uses old or deprecated encryption algorithms. Using outdated encryption algorithms is a security risk that can have a negative impact on your user experience and search traffic. Some web browsers may warn users accessing your website about loading insecure content. This usually negatively affects their confidence in your website, thereby stopping them from going further, and as a result you may experience a drop in your organic search traffic.
• How to fix it: Contact your website administrator and ask them to update encryption algorithms.

• About this issue:
  • Page (HTML) load speed is one of the most important ranking factors. The quicker your page loads, the higher the rankings it can receive. Moreover, fast-loading pages positively affect user experience and may increase your conversion rates.
  • Please note that “page load speed” usually refers to the amount of time it takes for a webpage to be fully rendered by a browser. However, crawler only measures the time it takes to load a webpage’s HTML code – load times for images, JavaScript and CSS are not factored in.
• How to fix it:
  • The main factors that negatively affect your HTML page generation time are your server’s performance and the density of your webpage’s HTML code. Try to clean up your webpage’s HTML code. If the problem is with your web server, you should think about moving to a better hosting service with more resources.

• About this issue: This issue is triggered if the size of your sitemap.xml file (uncompressed) exceeds 50 MB or it contains more than 50,000 URLs. Sitemap files that are too large will put your site at risk of being ineffectively crawled or even ignored by search engines.
• How to fix it: Break up your sitemap into smaller files. You will also need to create a sitemap index file to list all your sitemaps and submit it to Google. For more details, see this Google article.

• About this issue: Most search engines truncate titles containing more than 75 characters. Incomplete and shortened titles look unappealing to users and won’t entice them to click on your page.
• How to fix it: Try to rewrite your page titles to be 75 characters or less.

• About this issue: Generally, using short titles on webpages is a recommended practice. However, keep in mind that titles containing 10 characters or less do not provide enough information about what your webpage is about and limit your page’s potential to show up in search results for different keywords.
• How to fix it: Add more descriptive text inside your page’s <title> tag.

• About this issue:
  • Your text to HTML ratio indicates the amount of actual text you have on your webpage compared to the amount of code. This warning is triggered when your text to HTML is 10% or less.
  • Search engines have begun focusing on pages that contain more content. That’s why a higher text to HTML ratio means your page has a better chance of getting a good position in search results.
  • Less code increases your page’s load speed and also helps your rankings. It also helps search engine robots crawl your website faster.
• How to fix it: Split your webpage’s text content and code into separate files and compare their size. If the size of your code file exceeds the size of the text file, review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and removing embedded scripts and styles.

• About this issue: Though meta descriptions don’t have a direct influence on rankings, they are used by search engines to display your page’s description in search results. A good description helps users know what your page is about and encourages them to click on it. If your page’s meta description tag is missing, search engines will usually display its first sentence, which may be irrelevant and unappealing to users.
• How to fix it: In order to gain a higher click-through rate, you should ensure that all of your webpages have meta descriptions that contain relevant keywords.

• About this issue: It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title> and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.
• How to fix it: Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags. Sometimes it is unavoidable and they can be really similar.

• About this issue: While less important than <title> tags, <h1> headings still help define your page’s topic for search engines and users. If an <h1> tag is empty or missing, search engines may place your page lower than they would otherwise. Besides, a lack of an <h1> tag breaks your page’s heading hierarchy, which is not SEO friendly.
• How to fix it: Provide a concise, relevant h1 heading for each of your page.

• About this issue: When it comes to URL structure, using underscores as word separators is not recommended because search engines may not interpret them correctly and may consider them to be a part of a word. Using hyphens instead of underscores makes it easier for search engines to understand what your page is about. Although using underscores doesn’t have a huge impact on webpage visibility, it decreases your page’s chances of appearing in search results, as opposed to when hyphens are used.
• How to fix it: Replace underscores with hyphens. However, if your page ranks well, DO NOT DO THIS OR PLACE A PERMANENT REDIRECT.

• The sitemap should be declared in the Robots.txt file.

• About this issue:
  • This issue is triggered if the number of words on your webpage is less than 200.
  • The amount of text placed on your webpage is a quality signal to search engines.
  • Search engines prefer to provide as much information to users as possible, so pages with longer content tend to be placed higher in search results, as opposed to those with lower word counts.
• How to fix it: Improve your on-page content and be sure to include more than 500 meaningful words, 200 at the least.

• All redirects (with few exceptions) should be permanently redirected (301 instead of a 302). See below for definitions.

• About this issue: Alt attributes within <img> tags are used by search engines to understand the contents of your images. If you neglect alt attributes, you may miss the chance to get a better placement in search results because alt attributes allow you to rank in image search results. Not using alt attributes also negatively affects the experience of visually impaired users and those who have disabled images in their browsers.
• How to fix it: Specify a relevant alternative attribute inside an <img> tag for each image on your website, e.g., "<img src="mylogo.png" alt="This is my company logo">". Add a keyword in there if it fits naturally but do not stuff it in there.

• About this issue: A broken external image is an image that can’t be displayed because it no longer exists or because its URL is misspelled. Having too many broken external images negatively affects user experience and may be a signal to search engines that your website is poorly coded or maintained(really not a big issue, wouldn’t really waste time on it).
• How to fix it: Contact the website owner using the error image and notify them about the issue, or just ignore it, it’s not a huge issue.

• About this issue: Simplified URL structures are better, too many parameters can make it hard for Google to crawl
• How to fix it: Create a better url structure, nest the urls, permanently redirect the old version but not if the page ranks really well.

• Pages don’t necessarily need to have hreflang on them, only if the traffic comes from other countries than the sites primary country or language.
• About this issue:
  • This issue is reported if your page has neither lang nor HREFLANG attribute.
  • When running a multilingual website, you should make sure that you’re doing it correctly. First, you should use a HREFLANG attribute to indicate to Google which pages should be shown to visitors based on their location. That way, you can rest assured that your users will always land on the correct language version of your website.
  • You should also declare a language for your webpage’s content (i.e., lang attribute). Otherwise, your web text might not be recognized by search engines. It also may not appear in search results, or may be displayed incorrectly.

• How to fix it: Perform the following:

  • Add a lang attribute to the <html> tag, e.g., "<html lang="en">"
  • Add a hreflang attribute to your page’s <head> tag, e.g., <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="en"/>

• About this issue: A webpage’s doctype instructs web browsers which version of HTML or XHTML is being used. Declaring a doctype is extremely important in order for a page’s content to load properly. If no doctype is specified, this may lead to various problems, such as messed up page content or slow page load speed, and, as a result, negatively affect user experience.
• How to fix it: Specify a doctype for each of your pages by adding a <!Doctype> element (e.g., "<!Doctype HTML5>") to the very top of every webpage source, right before the <html> tag.

• About this issue:
  • Although, Flash-based pages may look nice, it is not recommended that you use Flash content for several reasons.
  • Most importantly, Flash content negatively impacts your website’s visibility because it cannot be properly indexed and crawled by search engines.
  • Secondly, using Flash content negatively affects your website’s performance. Search engines may consider it as a signal that your website isn’t worth ranking.
  • And finally, Flash content doesn’t work well on mobile devices.
• How to fix it: Try to avoid Flash content as much as possible.

• About this issue: <frame> tags are considered to be one of the most significant search engine optimization issues. Not only is it difficult for search engines to index and crawl content within <frame> tags, which may in turn lead to your page being excluded from search results, using these tags also negatively affects user experience.
• How to fix it: No real way for FH sites because we use frames, we have them noindexed though so nothing to worry about

• Update these to point to sites or external pages that actually work. This probably happened because a site changed their url structure, did not implement redirects, etc.

• If you are linking to a resource on your site, you shouldn’t “nofollow” the page. Internal linking is good for a site and no follow kind of removes the authority of a link.

• About this issue: This issue is triggered if a webpage contains more than three thousand links. Crawler doesn’t crawl more than three thousand on-page links. As a rule, other search engines crawlers treat webpages with too many links the same way: they crawl the first 3000 links on a page and ignore all the links that are over three thousand limit. Placing tons of links on a webpage can make your page look low quality and even spammy to search engines, which may cause your page to drop in rankings or not to show up in search results at all. Having too many on-page links is also bad for user experience.
• How to fix it: Try to keep the number of on-page links between 1,000 to 2,000 unless it is unavoidable or a category page with tons of products on it.

• About this issue:
  • A sitemap.xml file is used to list all URLs available for crawling. It can also include additional data about each URL.
  • Using a sitemap.xml file is quite beneficial. Not only does it provide easier navigation and better visibility to search engines, it also quickly informs search engines about any new or updated content on your website. Therefore, your website will be crawled faster and more intelligently.
• How to fix it: Consider generating a sitemap.xml file if you don’t already have one or updating and uploading your current one to Google Search Console.

• About this issue: One of the common issues you may face when using HTTPS is when your web server doesn’t support Server Name Indication (SNI). Using SNI allows you to support multiple servers and host multiple certificates at the same IP address, which may improve security and trust.
• How to fix it: Make sure that you web server supports SNI. Keep in mind that SNI is not supported by some older browsers, which is why you need to ensure that your audience uses browsers supporting SNI.

• About this issue: Google considers a website’s security as a ranking factor. Websites that do not support HTTPS connections may be less prominent in Google’s search results, while HTTPS-protected sites will rank higher with its search algorithms.
• How to fix it: Switch your site to HTTPS.

• About this issue: Your sitemap.xml should include the links that you want search engines to find and index. Using different URL versions in your sitemap could be misleading to search engines and may result in an incomplete crawling of your website.
• How to fix it: Replace all HTTP URLs in your sitemap.xml with HTTPS URLs.

• About this issue: If any link on website points to the old HTTP version of website, search engines can become confused as to which version of the page they should rank.
• How to fix it: Replace all HTTP links with the new HTTPS versions.

• About this issue: This issue is triggered if the Content-Encoding entity is not present in the response header. Page compression is essential to the process of optimizing your website. Using uncompressed pages leads to a slower page load time, resulting in a poor user experience and a lower search engine ranking.
• How to fix it: Enable compression on your webpages for faster load time.

• About this issue: Blocked resources are resources (e.g., CSS, JavaScript, image files, etc.) that are blocked from crawling by a “Disallow” directive in your robots.txt file. By disallowing these files, you’re preventing search engines from accessing them and, as a result, properly rendering and indexing your webpages. This, in return, may lead to lower rankings. For more information, please see this article.

• About this issue:
  • This issue is triggered if compression is not enabled in the HTTP response.
  • Compressing JavaScript and CSS files significantly reduces their size as well as the overall size of your webpage, thus improving your page load time.
  • Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files make your page load slower, which negatively affects user experience and may worsen your search engine rankings.
  • If your webpage uses uncompressed CSS and JS files that are hosted on an external site, you should make sure they do not affect your page’s load time.
  • For more information, please see this Google article.
• How to fix it:
  • Enable compression for your JavaScript and CSS files on your server.
  • If your webpage uses uncompressed CSS and JS files that are hosted on an external site, contact the website owner and ask them to enable compression on their server.
  • Ignore this if they are on a FH site, or if there are no clear things on the site we can remove like widgets, maps, etc.

• About this issue:
  • This issue is triggered if browser caching is not specified in the response header.
  • Enabling browser caching for JavaScript and CSS files allows browsers to store and reuse these resources without having to download them again when requesting your page. That way the browser will download less data, which will decrease your page load time. And the less time it takes to load your page, the happier your visitors are.
  • For more information, please see this Google article.
• How to fix it:
  • If JavaScript and CSS files are hosted on your website, enable browser caching for them.
  • If JavaScript and CSS files are hosted on a website that you don’t own, contact the website owner and ask them to enable browser caching for them.
  • If this issue doesn’t affect your page load time, simply ignore it.

• About this issue:
  • This issue is triggered if the total transfer size of the JavaScript and CSS files used on your page exceeds 2 MB.
  • The size of the JavaScript and CSS files used on a webpage is one of the important factors for a page’s load time. Having lots of clunky JavaScript and CSS files make your webpage “heavier” in weight, thus increasing its load time. This in turn leads to a poor user experience and lower search engine rankings.
  • For more information, please see this Google article.
• How to fix it: Review your pages to make sure that they only contain necessary JavaScript and CSS files. If all resources are important for your page, consider reducing their transfer size.

• About this issue:
  • This issue is triggered if a webpage uses more than a hundred JavaScript and CSS files.
  • Each time a visitor navigates to a webpage, their browser first starts loading supportive files, such as JavaScript and CSS. For each file used by your webpage, a browser will send a separate HTTP request. Each request increases your page load time and affects its rendering, which has a direct impact on user experience, bounce rate and, ultimately, search engine rankings.
  • For more information, please see this Google article.
• How to fix it:
  • Review your pages to make sure that they only contain necessary JavaScript and CSS files
  • If all resources are important for your page, we recommend that you combine them.

• About this issue:
  • Minification is the process of removing unnecessary lines, white space and comments from the source code.
  • Minifying JavaScript and CSS files makes their size smaller, thereby decreasing your page load time, providing a better user experience and improving your search engine rankings.
  • For more information, please see this Google article.
• How to fix it:
  • Minify your JavaScript and CSS files.
  • If your webpage uses CSS and JS files that are hosted on an external site, contact the website owner and ask them to minify their files.
  • If this issue doesn’t affect your page load time, simply ignore it.

• Self explanatory, only really bring this up if the site has crazy folders, nesting, navigation, etc. Otherwise it’s not a huge deal.

• Probably not an issue, “no-following” links is better for SEO as it does not pass along any link juice to the page you are linking to
• About this issue: A nofollow attribute is an element in an <a> tag that tells crawlers not to follow the link. “Nofollow” links don’t pass any link juice or anchor texts to referred webpages.
• How to fix it: Make sure you haven’t used nofollow attributes by mistake. Remove them from <a> tags, if needed. For more information, please see this Google article.

• About this issue: HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) informs web browsers that they can communicate with servers only through HTTPS connections. So, to ensure that you don’t serve unsecured content to your audience, we recommend that you implement HSTS support.
• How to fix it: Use a server that supports HSTS.

• About this issue: According to Google, URLs longer than 100 characters are not SEO friendly. Excessive URL length intimidates users and discourages them from clicking or sharing it, thus hurting your page’s click-through rate and usability. Besides, some browsers may have difficulties parsing extremely long URLs.
• How to fix it: Rewrite your URLs to be fewer than 100 characters.

• About this issue: Although multiple <h1> tags are allowed in HTML5, we still do not recommend that you use more than one <h1> tag per page. Including multiple <h1> tags may confuse users.
• How to fix it: Use multiple <h2>-<h6> tags instead of an <h1>.

• The file was not created, one should be created. See above for definitions.

• Incorrect HREFLANG tags. See glossary for definitions.

• About this issue: If a page cannot be accessed by search engines, it will never appear in search results. A page can be blocked from crawling either by a robots.txt file or a noindex meta tag.
• How to fix it: Make sure that pages with valuable content are not blocked from crawling by mistake.

• See definition in glossary. Each page should be tagged from somewhere else on the site.

• See glossary for definition. Either link to the pages from somewhere on the site or remove them from the sitemap if Google should not crawl them or they are an internal resource.

• About this issue: We all know that slow page-load speed negatively affects user experience. However, if a user can start interacting with your webpage within 1 second, they are much less likely to click away from this page. That’s why it is important to keep a close eye on the time it takes your most important webpages to become usable, known as the Average Document Interactive Time.
• How to fix it: Make sure that users can start interacting with your most important pages as quickly as possible.

• About this issue: The x-robots-tag is an HTTP header that can be used to instruct search engines whether or not they can index or crawl a webpage. This tag supports the same directives as a regular meta robots tag and is typically used to control the crawling of non-HTML files. If a page is blocked from crawling with x-robots-tag, it will never appear in search results.
• How to fix it: Make sure that pages with valuable content are not blocked from crawling by mistake.

• The http header is still indexed, it should be redirected to the HTTPs version

• Evaluate this page by page. Probably an issue with the robots.txt file or not an issue at all.

• About this issue: If your website uses JavaScript or CSS files that are hosted on an external site, you should be sure that they work properly. Any script that has stopped running on your website may jeopardize your rankings, since search engines will not be able to properly render and index your webpages. Moreover, broken JavaScript and CSS files may cause website errors, and this will certainly spoil your user experience.
• How to fix it: Contact the website owner and ask them to fix a broken file.

• About this issue: It’s usually preferred to have permanent redirects instead of temporary. Although using permanent redirects (a 301 or 308 redirect) is appropriate in many situations (for example, when you move a website to a new domain, redirect users from a deleted page to a new one, or handle duplicate content issues), we recommend that you keep them to a reasonable minimum. Every time you redirect one of your website’s pages, it decreases your crawl budget, which may run out before search engines can crawl the page you want to be indexed. Moreover, too many permanent redirects can be confusing to users.
• How to fix it: Review all URLs with a permanent redirect. Change permanent redirects to a target page URL where possible an actual issue.