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name description license metadata
technical-seo
Audits sitemap references, robots.txt directives, canonical tags, crawlability, URL structure, redirect chains, and indexability. Use when checking technical SEO foundations or fixing crawl/index issues.
MIT

Technical SEO

Audit fundamental technical SEO factors that affect crawlability and indexability.

1. Canonical URL

Check Status
<link rel="canonical"> missing ⚠️ WARN "Add canonical to prevent duplicate content"
Canonical present but empty href ❌ FAIL
Canonical points to a different domain ⚠️ WARN "Cross-domain canonical — verify this is intentional"
Canonical is relative (not absolute URL) ⚠️ WARN "Use absolute URLs for canonical tags"
Canonical present and valid ✅ PASS
Multiple canonical tags ❌ FAIL "Only one canonical allowed per page"
Canonical is self-referencing ✅ PASS (best practice)

2. Robots meta

Check Status
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> ⚠️ WARN "Page will not appear in search results"
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> ⚠️ WARN "Links on this page will not be followed"
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> ⚠️ WARN "Page excluded from search entirely"
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> or absent ✅ PASS "Page is indexable"
<meta name="googlebot"> present ✅ PASS — report its content

3. Robots.txt references

Check if the page references or is affected by robots.txt:

  • Look for <meta name="robots"> directives
  • If analysing a full site, check robots.txt at site root for:
    • Disallow rules that block the current page
    • Sitemap directive pointing to sitemap location
    • Crawl-delay directives (may slow indexing)

4. Sitemap references

Check Status
<link rel="sitemap"> present ✅ PASS
No sitemap reference found ⚠️ WARN "Consider adding sitemap reference"

If sitemap URL is available, verify:

  • Valid XML format
  • Contains the current page URL
  • No URLs returning 4xx/5xx status codes

5. URL structure

Analyse the page URL (from <link rel="canonical"> or <meta property="og:url">):

Check Status
URL contains uppercase letters ⚠️ WARN "Use lowercase-only URLs"
URL contains underscores ⚠️ WARN "Use hyphens instead of underscores"
URL contains special characters or spaces (encoded %20) ⚠️ WARN "Simplify URL structure"
URL exceeds 100 characters ⚠️ WARN "Keep URLs concise"
URL has double slashes (//path) ❌ FAIL "Fix double slashes"
URL has trailing slash inconsistency ⚠️ WARN "Be consistent with trailing slashes"
Clean, descriptive, lowercase with hyphens ✅ PASS

6. HTTP status hints

Check Status
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=..."> present ⚠️ WARN "Use 301 redirects instead of meta refresh"
Page contains window.location redirect in inline script ⚠️ WARN "JS redirects are not SEO-friendly"

7. Indexability checklist

Check Status
Has <title> tag Required for indexing
Has <meta name="description"> Required for SERP snippets
Has unique content (not empty <body>) Required
Not blocked by noindex Required
Has canonical URL Recommended
Is HTTPS (check canonical/og:url) ⚠️ WARN if HTTP

8. Pagination

Check Status
<link rel="prev"> / <link rel="next"> present ✅ PASS "Pagination properly marked"
Paginated content without prev/next ⚠️ WARN "Add for multi-page content"

9. Duplicate content signals

Check Status
Same <title> as canonical page but different URL ⚠️ WARN
No canonical + URL has query parameters ⚠️ WARN "URL parameters may create duplicate pages"
Multiple pages with identical meta description ⚠️ WARN

Edge cases

  • Next.js app router generates canonical tags automatically via the metadata export — audit the rendered HTML output
  • robots.txt may not be accessible if auditing a single HTML file — note this limitation and skip robots.txt checks
  • Pages behind authentication (login walls) may intentionally use noindex — flag as ⚠️ WARN but note context
  • Single-page applications with client-side routing may have a single canonical URL for all "pages" — flag as ⚠️ WARN
  • Staging/preview environments often have noindex — distinguish between intentional and accidental noindex when possible
  • Pages with rel="prev" / rel="next" are deprecated by Google (since 2019) but still supported by Bing — note as informational, not FAIL