SMX Sydney | Diagnosing Technical SEO Issues | SEOmoz

Danny’s checklist for diagnosing technical issues

• Prepare your browser- make sure your browser ‘see’s things like a S.E bot

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Change user agent to Googlebot

• Read the title tag and figure out how it could be improved
• See if the URL changed i.e. see if any redirects are being used
• Check if the URL is canonical
• Assess the global navigation
• Disable Javascript and reload the page
• Make sure the navigation works and all the links are HTML, this is how all readable links should be
• Assess the category and subcategory pages
• Make sure that pages have enough content of these pages to be useful
• Find and note any ancillary links that you might be able to take off the page
• Take notes on how you can improve the anchor text within links, need to get that right as it tells S.E’s what the destination page is about
• Check and note the format of title tags, very NB for humans and bots
• Check meta descriptions, Google does not use these for ranking but they can have a massive impact on click through rates
• Check and note the format of the URL, try make sure all are either lower case or upper case
• Check if the content is indexable check the text only version of the page in the cached version of Google
• Read the content as if you were the one searching for it
• Analyse the link profile
• View the anchor text distribution of inbound links
• How are the S.E’s indexing and treating the domains, search for the domain in Google, how many pages are indexed
• Choose a random content page and search the engines for dupe content

Thought it was a solid presentation, Danny could have got into some more advanced issues but for the newbies, I am sure they got a lot out of it.

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