SEO checker

Every issue carries the severity the site audit gives it. The checker adds no score on top: a page with one critical issue and a page with ten info notes are different problems, and a single number would hide that.

• Critical: the page can't be read or can't be understood. A missing title, a server error, or a crawler that was blocked. Fix these first.
• Warning: the page works, but something costs you in search. A missing meta description, several H1s, conflicting canonicals, thin content, a redirect chain.
• Info: worth knowing, often intentional. Long titles, short descriptions, skipped heading levels, a slow response, a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere.

A noindex tag or header asks search engines to leave the page out of their index. A canonical pointing at another URL asks them to index that URL instead. Both are normal on login pages, thank-you pages, filtered listings and syndicated copies, so the audit reports them as info and not as errors.

They matter when the page was supposed to rank. If you expected this URL in search results and the checker reports either one, that is the reason it is missing. Remove the noindex, or point the canonical at the page itself.

A noindex page is also excused from the thin content and no outgoing links checks, because a page you've kept out of the index doesn't need to meet them. The results list those two as not applicable.

Title and meta description

The audit flags a title over 60 characters as too long and under 10 as too short. Meta descriptions are flagged over 160 or under 70 characters. Search results cut long ones off, so put the words that describe the page first.

Headings

Use one H1 that says what the page is about. A second H1 is usually a logo or a banner marked up as a heading; make it a plain element. Heading levels should step down one at a time, so an H4 straight after an H2 gets flagged.

Thin content

An indexable page with fewer than 150 words of visible text is flagged as thin. The checker reads the HTML your server sends, without running JavaScript. If your page shows plenty of text in a browser but the checker counts almost none, the text is rendered client-side and plain-HTML crawlers may not see it either.

Slow response

The audit flags an HTML response that takes longer than 1.5 seconds to arrive. The time is measured from IndexZero's server to the first byte of the response, once, so run the check again before acting on a borderline result.

Redirects and blocked requests

One redirect is fine. Two or more in a row is a chain: point links and the first redirect straight at the final URL. If the checker reports it was blocked, your firewall or bot protection turned away its user agent, IndexZero-Audit. The issue's fix text explains how to allow it.

Some problems only exist between pages. This checker can't report broken internal link, duplicate title, duplicate meta description, duplicate page content, orphan page, page is deep in the site structure, because each needs the other pages of the site: their titles and text to compare, or the links between them.

It also checks the page as IndexZero's server fetched it, without JavaScript and without cookies, so a page that shows different HTML to logged-in visitors or to other locations may produce different results.

An IndexZero site audit crawls your site from its sitemap and links and runs all 27 checks across the pages it reaches. Audits spend credits. The free plan's monthly credits cover a small audit, and its page cap is 50 pages per audit.