Auditing Site for Common Problems
Discover how to diagnose and fix some common technical problems that almost always arise into the website in this lesson.
Duplicate content
One common battle that content developers often encounter is against duplicate content. Duplicate content is the situation where we have identical or near-identical content on multiple pages of our own site or on other sites.
Examples of duplicate content
Even when we attempt to create and upload unique content to our site’s pages, there are cases where duplicate content issues pop up unintentionally. Sometimes, our CMS creates multiple versions of the same page that appear on different URLs.
In e-commerce sites where there can be individual pages for multiple variations of the same product in different colors, for example, search engines might suspect duplicate content.
Such pages are nearly identical, apart from the slight differences, such as in the product name. There can be several different variations of the same product. This means that if there are 13 variations of a product, there will be 13 pages with near-identical content. Though a human visitor to the site is smart enough to understand the difference, it might confuse a search engine, making all the page variations struggle for ranking.
Letting duplicate content exist on our site without the necessary fixes can hurt our site’s ranking. The most popular technical solution to onsite duplicate content is the use of canonical tags.
Using canonical tags
Pages with similar content can be grouped together using canonical tags. It’s a marker added to the <head> section of the page’s HTML code to specify the original copy of the page or the copy we want to rank for.
For the example above where there were 13 variations for the throw blanket, let’s say we want to mark the ‘Faux Knit’ color as the main one. To do so, include the following code on all 13 pages, including the original one:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-Extra-Plush-Cozy-Lightweight-Sherpa-Throw-Blanket-50-X-60-Gray/826870015” />
If we’re using the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress, it automatically adds self-referencing canonical URLs to all our pages. Self-referencing canonical tags are those that simply specify the page’s URL that they are on as the original, which is the default case. We can customize canonicals using the “Advanced” settings on each page.
Check for duplicate content issues
Other than adding a canonical tag to every page on our website, we can audit our site to detect any duplicate content issues that still remain. Ahrefs Site Audit lets us identify unconsolidated duplicates in the “Content Quality” section.
We can also detect duplicate content using the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.
Broken links
Having a bunch of broken links on our site downgrades user experience. It’s frustrating to click a link and find out the page does not exist!
Dead links also eat away our crawl budget (discussed later). Broken internal links make it difficult for Googlebot to crawl and index our site’s pages. All of these issues resulting from broken links bring us to one point—broken links need fixing.
How to find broken links on our website
Semrush’s Site Audit tool crawls our site’s pages. Among other audits, it also points out the broken links. Ahrefs Site Audit, Ubersuggest Site Audit, and Screaming Frog are also good resources to detect dead links.
Here’s where we can spot broken links in Ubersuggest Site Audit.
There are no broken links in this case. However, if “broken links” appear in “TOP SEO ISSUES” on the right, we can click “View Details” to spot which links are broken.
How to resolve broken links
Broken links are resolved by either fixing it or redirecting to new, live URLs. We can either apply the redirects manually or use a WordPress plugin to make our job easier.
Manual approach
There are multiple ways to do the task manually. One approach is to use the meta refresh tag in the <head> section of the HTML page. Paste the following code with the address of the new URL we want to redirect to:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='http://new-content-webpage.com'" />
Another approach is to access and edit the .htaccess file from the root folder of our WordPress website. Here’s a complete guide on the different methods to apply 301 redirects to broken links.
Plugins
If we don’t want to spend time placing redirects manually, there are a bunch of WordPress plugins that make it easier for us. Simple 301 Redirects lets us check and redirect dead links in just a few steps.
Broken Link Checker is another free tool that scans our website for broken links. It also lets us "Edit" the link with a new URL. Since the plugin slows down our site’s performance while it is active, remember to remove the tool once its job is done.
Test your knowledge
Match the ways to fix broken links on the left to their most appropriate techniques on the right.
Resolve broken links manually
Edit the .htaccess file
Resolve broken links with plugins
Redirect dead links using a tool
Choose the best answer for the question below.
How can canonical tags help address duplicate content issues on a website?
By deleting duplicate pages
By redirecting duplicate pages to a single URL
By marking the original or preferred version of a page
By adding unique content to all pages
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