Frequently Asked Questions About Site Audit: Customer Support Digest #3

— Serpstat Domain Optimization (SDO) is a metric created by our analytics team. It shows how well a domain is optimized based on the correlation of the total number of errors and how critical they are to the number of possible errors.
Each issue has points. Points are automatically added to the SDO score if the previously recorded issue has been 100% fixed. SDO doesn't increase if the error is partially fixed.

For example, if you haven't fixed all the errors that were recorded in the report, some points won't be added. For the above reasons, the number of errors may decrease, and the SDO level may remain the same

— For the graph to appear, it is necessary to conduct at least two checks, after which the data for comparison will be shown on the graph.

Why audit speed is essential: at a high scanning speed, sites with low fault tolerance may have difficulty maintaining performance, or may give incorrect scanning results for the Serpstat crawler.

1. When starting an on-page SEO audit, you need to slow down the scanning speed and turn off its automatic control.

2. Select another crawler in the audit project settings. A site can block a particular type of User Agent, so you need to try changing it in the audit settings.

— It is necessary to check: probably, in the project settings, there is a limit on the number of scanned pages.

— It displays data only on the main page of the site. A more detailed report is available at Google PageSpeed Insights.

— These are 1000 links added to the interface; there can be any number of lines inside the Sitemap.

— Yes. For example, a user from the United States has closed his site from all IPs except American. He can add our IPs to the white list and scan his website this way.

— Our crawler uses this algorithm:
The robot starts crawling the site from the main page, following the links deeper into the website. The robot doesn't scan the sitemap (except when the sitemap has been preloaded in the audit settings), as well as pages that use canonical, noindex, and nofollow attributes. This algorithm is as close as possible to how search engine robots work.

An audit is not conducted for pages that are not involved in ranking and are not indexed by search engines.

Types of pages:

1. Non-canonical - pages with a canonical tag with a link to another page. When the canonical tag is on the page, we don't scan this page, but follow the specified page and scan it. You can find such links in the Custom Overview.

2. Closed from indexing - pages with the noindex tag. Such pages will also not be indexed by search engines, and therefore we won't crawl such pages. You can find such links in the Pages closed from indexing using the noindex meta tag or in the Custom Overview.

3. Closed from following - pages with the nofollow tag. When finding a link to pages with the nofollow tag, we don't follow it and therefore don't crawl according to the instructions of this tag. You can find such links in the check. The attribute rel = "nofollow" is used for internal links or in the Custom Overview.

— Noindex prohibits indexing at the page level but doesn't prohibit search robots from visiting it and clicking on the links that are used in the content.
The rel = nofollow attribute is most often used by optimizers if they want search engines not to consider the presence of an outbound link as a weight transfer factor, but the robot will still study the link.

The rel = nofollow tag is set in cases where it is not possible to guarantee the content of pages linked from your site.
Nofollow - prohibits search bots from following links at the page level (both external and internal).

— Elements using flash technology are obsolete. The biggest problem of the technology is that the user needs a special program (Flash Player) to see the animation or take advantage of interactivity.

Often flash elements occupy much space, which means that the user can wait a long time for information to load. Also, loading these items consumes a large amount of computer resources. These problems limit the use of flash on the Internet.