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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Best blog practices for website
For my Insurance website blog, I use MOZ to help me find high DA authoritative sites, then either generate ideas from them, or rewrite the copy. If I rewrite the copy, I tend to pull from 2 - 3 top authoritative sites. Just so I don't get in trouble, but still offer the most concision information. _My question is, Is this ok to do? _ Secondly, I just read that on some .Gov sites the information is public, and that you can use it as long as you give credit. _My questions is, how do I tell which information is public? _ Thank you in advance 🙂
Moz Pro | | MissThumann0 -
Domain Audit
Hi What is the best tool out there to doing a full brand audit for company. They've created at least 15 websites and have possibly many domain names which have been ordered by different people over many years. I need to find the quickest and best tool to do this with. Any suggestions would be great.
Moz Pro | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Help needed on what to do with deleti
Hi, i need some help as i am lost on what exactly the best to do. My website http://goo.gl/KxN8X6 I want to delete my community http://goo.gl/SbY39r which is giving me a nightmare when it comes to seo friendly. The /community has too many errors with seo and I think is harming the site growth. Now I want to delete it but if i delete it I am going to get a lot of 404 errors. So I was thinking to first add a Noindex and nofollow to it and in a month delete it. Could you please let me know if this is a good strategy? or if you can suggest something better. I really don't want the community. Thank you for your help.
Moz Pro | | blinky510 -
Website not being indexed by Google - does seomoz have a index checker?
i have been to a couple of index checking websites that are saying my website is not being indexed, my developer and seo team have been making a lot of changes recently and I think it is because of that. Also my first byte grade is D. Can I check here on seomoz if my site is being indexed by Google here in the UK?
Moz Pro | | Malx0 -
I need to get a page in the top 3 Google results for my keyword "teaching jobs" but am struggling to do so! Can anyone help?
I'm trying to get this page http://www.eteach.com/teaching-jobs to rank as the top search result on Google with the keyword "teaching jobs" but it seems to be number 5 in the results! My competitors are totally kicking my arse on getting this page to be above my website. I've got the keywords in there, I have the right content and I have links, what more can I do to make it rank as number 1! Help please!! If anyone has an SEO check list of things I need to make sure I do on my pages for them to rank in the top 3 results then that would be really handy!
Moz Pro | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Error on SEOMoz When Trying to Track Website. Please Advise
Hi, I'm trying to start a new campaign for a root domain, but I'm getting the "Roger found an error" and am not sure what to make of it. Error #1: "You've decided to set up a root domain campaign, but entered the subdomain path: www.siteurl.com. Don't worry, we'll switch that for you and crawl everything on the subdomain: www.siteurl.com. If you meant to set this up to only crawl pages in the root domain, click 'Go back and Change" and enter a root domain URL in step 1." Error #2: "Oops! The root domain siteurl.com redirects to a domain that is not within the specified root domain (www.siteurl.com). This will cause us to stop crawling as the first discovered page falls outside of the root domain you've defined. Please make sure you enter a root domain that resolves to a page that is under the root domain." What does this mean? Is there something I am doing wrong? The first error is what returned when I input www.siteurl.com. The second was returned when I put just siteurl.com. I didn't put up the exact URL for privacy reasons, but if you really do want to help me out, PM me and I can give you the real URL. Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | locallyrank0 -
When is the new SEO moz Rank Tracker tool coming?
Anyone know when is the new SEO moz Rank Tracker tool coming? Getting a little flustered with the rank tracker tool, its bit annoying doing one by one. 😞
Moz Pro | | waheeed0 -
Link Assistant SEO Tool - Any Others?
I have the most boring copier service website, clients cool, concept is really boring; Well I am looking to generate this client some link back juice, cause this guy is struggling for traffic, and I am am struggling to generate a buzz about copier services?? Fortunately, it's only local, so that helps me with testing my localization campaigning. 🙂 Any opinions on this software? http://www.link-assistant.com Do you know of some better "Back Linking Software? I was considering buying it. But once I go to purchase it, I second guess myself; "It just looks shady, and the perpetual up-sale, turns me off.". I really just value the MOZer communities opinions! and I want to see what the community thinks of the above company, and if ya heard anything good, or bad. The Demo seems legit as hell!
Moz Pro | | smstv0