Once a month, we'll want to review the SemRush Site Audits and address errors and warnings to get the scores as high as we can.
Make a list of any Site Audits that need be addressed, generally anything under 90% (under or control) and the big sites (OMG, Securities, Madonna, Xcel). As stuff will be reordered or drop off during re-audits, that list will be handy.
There's no specific procedure for this it. Each error/warning needs to be investigated. This wiki will provide an area for us to leave notes and tips on how to handle each issue.
Errors Duplicate Content Issues|- This could be caused by multiple urls going to the same page/entry, this can also cause other issues (duplicate title, duplicate content)
- In this case, need to add detours or meta_canon or meta_canon_segments or other logic to reduce the page to a single URL
- If this is something else, may need to involve the marketing/content team to resolve
- This could be caused by multiple urls going to the same page/entry, this can also cause other issues (duplicate title, duplicate content)
- In this case, need to add detours or meta_canon or meta_canon_segments or other logic to reduce the page to a single URL
- Could be separate entries with the same description
- Change one of the titles or the templates meta_description/meta_summary element or in the SEO Meta Data Tab
- This could be caused by multiple urls going to the same page/entry, this can also cause other issues (duplicate meta, duplicate content)
- In this case, need to add detours or meta_canon or meta_canon_segments or other logic to reduce the page to a single URL
- Could be separate entries with the same title
- Change one of the titles or the templates meta_title element or in the SEO Meta Data Tab
This could be as simple as a formatting error, a bad url, or something else.
We've seen this a lot with URLs that have forced redirects attached to them. The solution for this is to exclude the entry from the Sitemap. Edit the entry, click on SEO Meta Data tab, and check 'Hide from Sitemap' and then save. Then check the Sitemap, it should no longer be found. If you don't see this option or it doesn't work, make sure you have the newest versions of SEO Meta Data and OMGCP installed.
|Internal Links are Broken|This should be as simple as fixing the link, usually so they don't 404.
On the off chance (and we do have some sites like this) these are linking to a subdomain of our site that we don't control (like joinsai.securitiesamerica.com) but we can't change the link for "reasons", you can add 'rel="nofollow"' to the a tag. This is not a great solution as this will actually throw a Warning, but Warnings are preferred to errors. More likely, we'll nofollow links to these subdomains to prevent semRush from crawling those subdomains and giving us a ton of other errors that we have no control over. A warning is preferred to bunch of errors that we can't fix.
|Links Couldn't Be Crawled|This is usually due to incorrect URL formatting. Just investigate these and fix them as necessary.
- Sometimes, usually in Wygwam output, tel links will be preceded by 'http://', making it an invalid link. In Wygwam, change the 'http://' Protocol to 'other' (double click on the link)
- Sometimes, also in tel links, the characters in the URL cause issues, usually the separation characters. It seems to like hyphens but not much else. All else fails, use search and replace, either natively or using Stringer, to remove those characters.
Sometimes this is caused by ajax pages not having any meta tags. In this instance, place the tag in the example on the first line of the template.
|Pages Have Slow Load Speed|On some sites, they are usually a few pages that trigger this error and it's usually due to a ton of querries being run. You can enable EE Debugging to investigate. Try adding caching to the tag (or the template itself if possible) and make sure the page is cached before reauditing. May not always be able to get this one clean, just do what you can.
|Page Returned a 4XX Status Code|This will crop up simply if a page on the site it's trying to crawl is returning a Error Code. This can be a bade URL (figure out where it's coming from) or even a problem with a template tag. Investigate each issue and fix as needed.
Warnings Duplicate H1 and Title Tags|It may seem odd, but the h1 tag and title tag can't have the same text. Usually, our templates with their meta variables take this into account.
- Check the meta_title variable in the template. Make sure there is something besides title inside it ({site_name}, {channel}, etc.)
- If it's a select entry, like one or two blogs, a lot of times you'll just have to modify the SEO Title in the SEO Meta Data tab of the entry. Sometimes the plugin truncates the default title to the title of the entry, causing this error.
- Alternatively, can also modify the H1 Tag field in SEO Meta Data, but this changes the content, not just the meta tag, so generally not preferred in most situations.
This error doesn't necessarily mean the link is broken. Sometimes the links work fine but when crawled are returning a 400 error. There are two general solutions to this problem:
- Remove the link
- Add 'rel="nofollow"' to the a tag for the link (usually in Wygwam -> View Source)
The preferred method is nofollow as it keeps the links in tact, especially on blogs. Removing the link is fine on standard content pages.
|Have Too Much Text Within the Title Tags|You're only supposed to have 75 characters in the title tag. SEO Meta Data truncates this for you and is controlled by a plugin setting. Knowing that, generally if you see this error, it's an intentional decision. Ask someone if you're unsure but don't change anything until you are.
|Images Don't Have ALT Attributes|All 'img' tags need an 'alt' tag with a description.
- If tag is in a template, add it. A lot of times you can populate with the title of the entry or the title of the image itself.
- A lot of times, the tag is inside a Wygwam field. Manually add the alt tag here. You can double click on the image in the editor and add text to the "Alternative Text" field.
This one is exactly as it sounds.
- You may be able to change 'http://' to 'https://' in the link, but make sure the target URL is SSL'd.
- Remove the link? Not a great solution
Simple, add an H1 heading to this page. This actually occurs most often on the homepage. Sometimes there's not a great place for this, so adding an h1, often with the site_name, and a class of hidden or a style of 'display: none;' will get the job done. Not ideal, but does in a pinch.
|Pages Have a JavaScript and CSS Total Size That is Too Large|This comes up a bit and the largest culprit has been FontAwesome. Replace the fontawesome.all.js in the minimee:js tag in the footer. There may also be a fontawesome CSS file in the header, just delete that.
Scrub the site for 'fal' and 'far' icons. You can use search and replace for this if needed. Replace 'far fa-' and 'fal fa-' with 'fas fa-' in ALL Templates. You can also search the database for these.
Load the page and make sure icons load correctly. This can drop about 5MB off of the file size and we are currently doing this by default on new sites.
|Pages Have Low Text-HTML Ratio|This is a bizarre "issue". Too much HTML, not enough text on the page? OK.
Anyway, nothing to really do here. This is technically a content issue.
Or reduce the amount of HTML you're using.
Just kidding.
Ignore this or let content team know and then they'll probably ignore it for you.
|Pages Have a Low Word Count|This usually goes hand-in-hand with "Pages Have Low Text-HTML Ratio" but this is at least a sensicle issue. Not enough content on the page, bad for SEO.
As a developer, not a whole lot to be done here. We're not qualified to modify content. If anything, let content managers know that this issue is being flagged.
|Temporary Redirects|The crawlers don't like 302 redirects, they like 301s. If possible, you'll need to manage the redirects as needed or change to a 301 (in Detour Pro, if in the redirect tag add 'status_code="301"' parameter to the tag.
This could also be an issue with SEO Meta Data, if the URL is redirecting to the 404 page. Make sure SEO Meta Data is up to date.
|Uncached JavaScript and CSS Files|This usually pops up with CSS or JS that's added by a JS script. You can try adding it to the templates and preventing the script from running, but often there's not a whole lot to do here.
|Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS Files|We always want to use compressed CSS and JS files. You can stick the file in Minimee tags or use a '.min' version of the file.
This error and popped up several times for Minimee compressed files and we haven't figured out the cause for this, as inspections shows these files are compressed.
|Structured Data Items are Invalid|The above example can be added to blog and will give you a good idea of the types of changes that need to be made.
The following are great tools and resources as well:
Backlink Audit- Log in to semrush and in backlink audit click on toxic domains.
- Go through the links and select the ones needs to be disvowed.
- Once selected, click on disavow button.
- Go to the disavow list and select "Export to TXT"
- Go to Google search console, make sure you are logged in as omahamediagroup account.
- Select the property as site domain/url.
- Upload the TXT file
- Once uploaded, a new button will show up to download the list.
- Go back to semrush and upload the downloaded list to "Import Disavow links".
Note: You can upload only one file at a time. So if you decide to do a batch every month select the whole list and export to txt file. Google will be update the past and present URLs every time.
Here is the list of links to refer-
Disavow:
- https://www.semrush.com/kb/764-disavowing-your-backlinks
- https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-disavow/#disavow-links-quickly-and-easily-with-semrush
Remove:
- https://www.semrush.com/kb/766-removing-your-backlinks
Just ignore these. They don't affect the score and are often caused by fixes we implemented. Just move along.