Ahref Site Audit – Quick Guide

As the name suggests, the Ahref Site Audit is an audit of your website with many advanced optimization adjustments that will allow your content to rank for keywords and phrases. Ahref Site Audit focuses on the following key areas:

1. Find and fix crawl errors

2. Improve website speed

3. Improve website structure

4. Fix broken links and status codes

5. Fix duplicate content/tags

Why is Technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is vital since it guarantees that the website is search engine friendly and devoid of any technical problems that would impede search engines from crawling and ranking it in the SERPs. Technical SEO aims to improve better ranking and better website visibility in SERPs.

Tools to audit and fix issues

We use some SEO tools to audit the websites. These will perform an initial scanning and bring to light some of the technical errors and issues that would be relevant to fix to improve the technical SEO of the website. For now, we use these tools:

• Ahref Site Audit
• Inspect (the browser command to check for additional issues)

Ahref Site Audit – Setup

Follow these steps to add the website to Ahref Site Audit.

1. Go to Ahref and click on Site Audit
2. Click on New Project
3. Choose the option Add manually
4. In the first field, insert the domain name like this e.g., “erkg-blog.com” i.e., without HTTPS – in the field Project Name insert the same i.e. “erkg-blog.com” (makes it easier to locate later on) – click Continue
5. Click Continue (no need to verify ownership)
6. Please make sure to disable the feature called Run scheduled crawls – click Continue
7. No changes are needed for this page – click Continue
8. Click Finish

Wait 30-45 min for the audit to complete and view the results.

Multiple meta description tags

Problem: Pages with more than one meta description tag.

A meta description tag is generally used to provide the search engine with a short, informative summary of your page’s content. High-quality descriptions can sometimes be displayed in Google’s search results as search snippets, helping you get higher click-through rates from SERPs.

Multiple meta descriptions can confuse search engines as they only expect one meta description tag per page.

How to fix

Multiple meta description tags are often handled in either the theme or the SEO-plugin, i.e., Rank Math. If the theme and Rank Math try to handle the meta description tags, the “multiple tags” conflict will be present. 

We must fix this by checking the theme installed via its settings or deactivating the Rank Math plugin. Go to the settings of the specific website theme and locate the feature to deactivate meta description tags. If it is impossible to deactivate the meta descriptions via the theme settings, then please deactivate and remove the Rank Math SEO plugin.

If the Rank Math SEO plugin is removed, we need to recreate the sitemap since it was created in the first place by this plugin. Go to the “Plugins” area and search for this plugin XML Sitemap Generator for Google. Install the plugin. The plugin’s settings can be accessed via Tools. Please go here and find the new URL of the sitemap. 

Next go to Google Search Console for the website in question. Go to Sitemap, delete the old sitemap, and submit the URL of the new sitemap created by XML Sitemap Generator for Google. Now we have the updated sitemap in Google Search Console.

Orphan page(s)

Problem: Pages with no internal link.

Orphan pages of a website have no incoming internal links. Search engine crawlers can only discover such pages from the sitemap file or from external backlinks. Website visitors won’t be able to get to this page from any other page on your website.

How to fix

Often orphan pages are content in the taxonomy of “page”. Content created as “pages” needs to be attached to the menu, unlike the taxonomy “post” that is displayed automatically in the relevant categories of the website.

Make sure to attach such “pages” to the menu.

Noindex page in sitemap

Problem: The page is both in sitemap and marked for noindex.

If the meta tag “noindex” is added to a page, it instructs the search engine bots to disallow indexation of the particular page. If a page is included in the sitemap and has the noindex meta tag, this is contradictory.

How to fix

Two solutions are available. First, analyze the affected pages. Then, decide if they need to be removed from the sitemap or if the noindex meta tag should be removed from the page.

Noindex page

Problem: Not a problem, but an opportunity to check for mistakes.

If a page has the meta tag “noindex”, it instructs the search engine bots to disallow indexation of that particular page. It is normal to noindex pages like the sitemap, a contact page, an about page, a privacy policy page, and the like.

How to fix

There is no right and wrong solution here. You need to analyze the pages with noindex and evaluate, if the noindex is wrongly added or not. If noindex is added to a page with an important guide or a post with some content relevant to the website, then it is highly recommended that you remove the noindex meta tag to allow the search engine bots to index the page and generate traffic.

Page has links to broken page

Problem: Page has a broken link to another page.

Pages on the website that have a link to an external or internal URL, which return a 404 or 410 response code. So these URLs are responding with an error message “Not Found” or “Gone”. This is classified as a “broken link”. These broken links are inaccessible.

How to fix

We have 3 leading solutions available:

• replace the broken links with relevant URLs to active and relevant pages
• remove the links on the affected pages
• redirect with a 301 Redirect to a relevant page or the front page (this is especially useful if the broken link page has link equity i.e. internal or external backlinks pointing to it

Hint: If you wish to set up a 301 Redirect, then please install the “Redirection” plugin via “Plugins“. It is the one developed by John Godley. Use this plugin to set up the redirection.

404 page

Problem: A page was not found on the website.

The status code 404 is a “Not Found” response error. It means that this particular URL cannot be found. The reason could be the page was deleted previously, and the correct redirection was never implemented.

How to fix

It is important to analyze all the 404 URLs and determine if you wish to:

• set up a 301 Redirect
• set up a 410 Gone

Usually, we will try to preserve the link equity of the original page by setting up a 301 redirection to either:

• another relevant page on the website
• or redirect to the front page of the website

If the 404 URL is not valuable or no relevant substitute can be found, then we set up a 410 Gone. The 410 Gone instructs the search engine bots that this particular page has been deleted for good and is now gone from the websites.