Technical SEO check

The silent killers

A small set of mistakes does not degrade your visibility, it switches it off entirely. They are invisible in the browser, which is why they sometimes survive for months:

• A noindex set on a staging environment that travelled along to production
• A canonical pointing at a different or non-existent domain, so Google leaves your actual page alone
• A robots.txt that closes the whole site to crawlers in a single line
• A sitemap containing URLs on another domain, which gets it ignored wholesale

What else gets checked

Beyond the blockers, the audit looks at what decides how you appear in the results and how well Google understands the page:

• Page title: present, not your framework's placeholder, and short enough not to get truncated
• Meta description: present, and neither too short nor too long
• Heading structure: one H1, no skipped levels
• Structured data: present, and whether the JSON-LD is actually valid — invalid structured data is silently ignored
• Social sharing metadata, so a shared link does not show up as bare text
• Hreflang, if you run more than one language version
• Whether pages that should stay out of the index — login screens, thank-you pages — are indexable anyway

Indexable is not the same as indexed

A technically correct page is a precondition, not a guarantee. Google decides for itself what it keeps, and pages without their own value stay out of the index no matter how clean your metadata is.

Two things that do help and get forgotten: internal links and a sitemap. A page nothing links to is an orphan — it may sit in your sitemap, but Google reads the absence of links as evidence that it apparently is not important. Make sure every page you care about is reachable from your navigation, your footer, or another page.

Always check the rendered HTML

On sites that assemble their content with JavaScript, what you see in 'view source' often differs from what a crawler ends up with. This audit loads your page in a real browser and judges the rendered result, including metadata that only gets set by JavaScript.

That is also where language switchers that live only in the browser fall apart: if your English version appears after a click and has no URL of its own, it does not exist to a search engine. If you want to be found on English queries, that version needs its own address.

Frequently asked questions

How fast will I see the effect of a technical fix?

As soon as Google crawls again — days to weeks, depending on how often it comes by. URL inspection in Search Console lets you request a recrawl and speed that up.

Do I need structured data?

Necessary, no. Useful, often. It helps Google classify your page and can earn richer presentation in the results. Invalid JSON-LD earns nothing, so if you do it, do it properly.

Is this enough to start ranking?

No. Technical SEO clears the obstacles; it does not make your page the best answer to a query. That still comes down to content that genuinely solves something.