Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and need remediation?
-
Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and needs remediation? I am being tested for a job interview to prove and/or disprove a website has issues. I am familiar with Moz tools but I'm not sure of the procedure for this request? I am not finding anything online. The client will be giving a website and I will be doing this audit.
What tools would you use?
What exactly should I be looking for?
What are some obvious fixes?
WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?
-
Joseph,
Yes, GWT = Google Webmaster Tools
In GA, you will want to take a look at traffic levels, Bounce Rate, Page views, Time On Page, etc. If any of these metrics show a significant decrease instantaneously (over a couple of days) you can be fairly sure there is something going on from a penalization standpoint. That, or the GA tracking code may have been tampered with during a site redesign. The way to know this is occurring is if your rankings are staying relatively high, but your measured traffic is decreasing drastically. We had a client who went through this just this week - it's a small problem to fix, but it can make your heart race when you think it's a penalty.
GWT will inform you of any penalization taken against your website (if it is manual). If it is algorithmic, your only real warning will be your ranking and traffic drops. Besides that, it is also fairly good for security issues, but these may not be alluded to directly. A great way to determine whether a site is at risk/hacked is to check the link profile - if there is an unnaturally large number of incoming spammy links, there are good odds you are the target of a negative SEO attack, or the site is hacked and being used for spam. Use a site: search to determine if new pages are being created on your sitemap and what they are targeting.
These are worst-case scenarios, so I don't know if you will be tested on them. More likely you will have to make adjustments to some basic on-site ranking factors like H1's or Title Tags.
Feel free to touch base any time if you need additional tips - you can PM me anytime.
Best of luck!
-
in GA - traffic drop offs, in fact any large changes in any metrics
GWT - manual actions, system messages, security issues
-
Dmitrii! Thanks very much!
Any pointers and/or specific areas to pay attention to in GA and GWT? Joe
-
Rob, Thanks very much for this!
GWT is Google Webmaster Tools?
Also, Any pointers and/or specific areas to pay attention to in GA and GWT?
-
Hi.
My belief is that for ANYWHAT good TECHNICAL audit you will need access to Google Analytics and GWT. Because it's TECHNICAL. And these tools will tell you everything about penalizations etc.
Yes, you can use MOZ, but if you don't have access to historical rankings data - there is no much use to determine anything about penalizations.
The rest is covered by other comments - ahrefs/majestic/OSE for backlink profile, MOZ Rank Tracker for current rankings, webpagetest and PageSpeed for loading times.
And the most important - your own head. Just look at the website. If that website has been penalized - there is huge reason for that and you'd be able to see it just by looking at the website architecture, content etc.
-
Hi Joseph,
I will give you a list of the tools I use/have used for auditing purposes of a website and you can pick and choose what you think might be useful:
On-Site - These will help you with on-site penalties (Panda)
1. SEMrush (http://www.semrush.com/)
Beautiful on-site auditing tool. Provides you with knowledge of the site from the perspective of Googlebot and outlines all issues with URL's included so you know where to go/what to fix with minimal involvement from you. It is a monthly subscription service and also incorporates keyword-tracking software, among other things. Deliverables include PDF's and CSV's of data.
2. SEO Powersuite SiteAuditor (www.seopowersuite.com)
This is a one-time cost piece of software. It is less flexible and in-depth than SEMrush in my opinion, but it gets the job done. The primary selling point is that SEO Powersuite provides you with multiple SEO tools for a one-time fee.
Off-Site (Link Profile) - These will help you with off-site penalties (Penguin)
1. Majestic (https://majestic.com/)
Great link-profile tool that allows you to conduct link audits of a website. I use this tool to develop competition analysis reports, and to determine the value of links, whether they are worth keeping, what links I might pursue from competitors, etc. It is a monthly service and you can compare your client's site to others in their niche/industry directly from an off-site perspective. Reports are in CSV format.
2. Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com)
This is a more in-depth tool that many of my co-workers prefer compared to Majestic. They perform much the same service, but Ahrefs has a more extensive database. It is a more "techy" option than Majestic, which is geared more for client presentation.
You will also want to make sure that they are providing you with all the tools you need to conduct the technical audit - GA access, GWT access, etc.
Hope this helps and let me know if you need any further pointers!
Rob
-
Moz tools will show you all of the crawl issues (Which includes any crawl errors, duplicate content, meta tag errors, robot.txt errors And A LOT more), spammy links, on page seo, bad reviews and many other problems.
I'm not sure what else they would be looking for. Those tools will bring up so many errors (more than likely) Then you just need to learn/explain how to fix these errors.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can you create in the Keyword Difficulty Tool several separate reports?
If I go now to the Keyword Difficulty Tool and submit keywords, I get one list with all keywords (let's say 300), but I have actually say 30 keywords per segment/niche I wan't to view. Is is possible to have 10 separate reports?
Moz Pro | | TrendDevelopment1 -
Is there a way you can determine the time SEOMoz crawls your website
I'm a new user to SEOMoz Pro, and having created a number of campaigns I wanted to know if you can set / schedule when SEOMoz crawls your website? Ideally I want to prevent SEOMoz from crawling my site at certain times, but I can't seem to find a way of doing this. Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | Simon_Glanville0 -
Keyword rankings tool not fully populated today?
I logged in today and my rankings are normally crawled on Thurs, and of my 66 keywords only 6 of them are showing any data - the rest are all blank. It's been going for weeks so it's not like it doesn't have it's initial data yet. I presume this is some issue or artifact that the results haven't been input yet. Can someone help answer this?
Moz Pro | | mlm12
Thanks,
Michelle0 -
SEO MOZ keyword ranking tool
Hi Guys, Can anyone please help me! I have a client that has two web pages that he wants optimising, one page is the home page and the other page is within the page.. Does anyone know if the SEO MOZ ranking tool only looks at the home page for jeywords or will it look at what ranking is the the other page within the website?? Or do I have to set up separate campaign jut for one page within the website?? Can anyone answer this please? Thanks Gareth
Moz Pro | | GAZ090 -
Need assistance with tool development using SEOMoz & Google APIs
I don't know where the right place to ask this is, but I work for an SEO agency, and we are looking for someone to help us with development of some tools utilizing the SEOMoz API and probably the Google API as well. Does anyone know where I could find a person with some previous experience with development using these APIs? We've had poor luck just trying to use a developer without specific experience in this area or at least some SEO knowledge. If you're a developer and would like to talk with us, you can contact me directly if you prefer, rather than post your contact info publicly, but I welcome any helpful thoughts or ideas regarding development of SEO tools. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | BandLeader
John
jmaher [at] mcdia.com0 -
Why is the SEOmoz crawler crawling the old version of our website?
Hello, I'm a new SEOmoz member. On Dec. 2nd, after completely redesigning our website, we migrated to a new hosting company by switching our DNS to the new server. The vast majority of the URLs have changed and we configured redirects of the old URLs to the new ones. Although, this task is not completed yet. After the migration, I created an account on SEOmoz to be able to track our progress and find the issues to fix to optimize our SEO. For some reason, in the SEOmoz reports it is the old URLs that show up. Unless the crawler does not actually crawl the pages and only uses the indexed pages to generate its report, I don't understand how could this possible. Anyone has a clue? When will the new URLs be indexed by SEOmoz and the major search engines? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Gestisoft-Qc0 -
What percentage of total backlinks are shown by "Open site explorer" tool?
What percentage of total good quality back links are shown in the "Open site" or other toolbar. I was checking backlinks for a spammy sites which ranks in #3-5 for a competitive keyword.But could not find nothing more than 10-15 PR4-5 in content backlinks and rest are just forum/profile signatures. 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
Moz Pro | | RyanSat
22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
20% Anchor Text of External Links
15% On-Page Keyword Usage
7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
6% Social Graph Metrics
5% Registration and Hosting DataI0 -
Any plans to allow direct comparison between a selected website (client) and top competitors?
Hi, I really like the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool. It currently reports metrics between the top 10 positions. Is there any plan to introduce the facility to directly compare metrics between a selected website and that of other competing websites. For example, a clients' website compared to the top 10 results, or compared to a number of other selected competiors websites? Best wishes, David
Moz Pro | | Hallam0