Warnings and how to fix them

In addition to the errors that will definitely have a negative influence on your rankings, the website audit tool checks your web pages for things that can have a negativeinfluence:

No text content

If a web page does not have text content, there is nothing that search engines could index. Having text content on a web page is important if you want to rank that page on search engines.

Solution: add text content to the page.

Little text content

If a web page does not have much text content, it might be that search engines ignore the page. Pages with little content can get good rankings under some seldom circumstances but it is usually much better to have pages with more text.

Solution: add more text to the page. The text should make sense to human visitors and it should be related to the page and your company.

No bot allowed

If the robots.txt file of your website or the robots meta tag does not allow any bot to index the page, then search engines won't show that page in the search results.

Solution: change the robots.txt file and/or the robots meta tag on the page so that search engines can index the page.

Bot blocked

The robots.txt file of your website or the robots meta tag of the page does not allow particular bot to index the page. That means that the corresponding search engine won't show the page in the search results.

Solution: check if you really want to block this bot.

Click depth

The fewer clicks people need to get to a web page from the index page of a site, the more important is that page. Search engines tend to give pages that require a lot of clicks lower rankings than web pages that can be reached with a few clicks.

Solution: make sure that the important pages on your website can be reached with a few clicks from your home page.

Duplicate page

Duplicate content is not good for search engine rankings. If you have the same web page twice on your website, this can have a negative influence on the search engine positions of these pages.

Solution: if possible avoid duplicate pages. If you must have duplicate pages, use the canoncial attribute to specify the main version of the page.

Duplicate paragraphs

Duplicate paragraphs can lead to duplicate content problems. The duplicate content check in the audit tool ignores boilerplate elements such as headers and footers. Other duplicate elements should be avoided.

Solution: Removed the duplicate paragraphs from the page. Each page should have unique content.

302 redirect

A 302 redirect code tells the search engines that the redirect is only temporary. 302 redirects are not good for search engine rankings.

Solution: If the redirect is not temporary, change the 302 redirect to a 301 redirect.

Too many links

If a page contains too many links, search engines might think that the page itself does not contain enough content. Search engines don't want to show pages that just link to other pages in the search results.

Solution: If possible, remove some of the links to other websites from the page.

Duplicate canonical attribute

If a page uses the canonical attribute twice, search engine can get confused and skip the page.

Solution: Remove the duplicate canonical attribute.

Meta description empty

The meta description tag helps search engines to display a useful snippet on the search results pages. A missing description tag means that the web page won't be displayed as well as possible in the search results.

Solution: Add a descriptive meta description to the page.

Meta description too short

The meta description should have at least 50 characters so that search engines will display it on the search results page.

Solution: Use a longer meta description on the page.

Meta description too long

If the meta description is too long, search engines won't display all of it on the search results pages. In addition, very long meta description might be interpreted as a spamming attempt.

Solution: Use a shorter meta description.

Meta description wasted

The meta description of the page does not include useful words.

Solution: Write a better meta description that is relevant to the page and your business. Boilerplate meta descriptions won't do your website good. Include a call to action: think of what you want a user to do when they visit your page and then include a call to action in the description.

Meta refresh

The page uses a meta refresh tag. That means that search engines won't index the page itself but the page to which the redirect goes.

Solution: Remove the meta refresh or use a 301 redirect.

Duplicate meta tag

The page uses a meta tag twice. This can confuse search engines and it is an indicator of poor web page design.

Solution: Remove the duplicate meta tag.

Page too big

The web page is very big and it takes a long time to load the page. Web page loading time is a factor in Google's ranking algorithm.

Solution: Split the page content into many smaller pages.

Title too short

A short title may not sufficiently describe the page to the search engine users and likely does not include relevant keywords for the search engines.

Solution: Add a more descriptive title to the web page.

Title too long

You shouldn't use more than 65-70 characters in a web page title because search engines will shorten your title then when displaying it on the search results page.

Solution: Use a shorter web page title.

Title wasted

The web page title is a very important ranking element. If you get this error message, it seems that your title does not contain any meaningful keywords for the search engines.

Solution: Add a more descriptive title to the web page.

Title tag used twice

If a web page uses the title tag twice, search engines can get confused. A duplicate title tag might be misinterpreted as a spamming attempt and it is an indicator of poor web page design.

Solution: Remove the duplicate title tag.

URL invalid

If a page URL contains characters which are not allowed in URLs then Search engines might not index the page for that reason (although your browser might be able to display the page).

Solution: Remove the invalid characters from the web page URL.

Too many URL parameters

Search engine representatives have warned against using more than two parameters in the URL of a web page. Search engines might exclude the page from crawling if it contains many more parameters.

Solution: Remove the as many parameters as possible from the URL. If necessary, rewrite the URLs on your website so that they do not contain any variables at all.

URL too long

A good URL is descriptive and concise so that it can be used in email messages, tweets or submission forms. Search engines might not look for ranking information in long URLs.

Solution: If possible, use a shorter URL for the page.

Continue with 'Notices and how to fix them'.