Broken internal pages (4xx)
Visitors and Google hit dead ends, link value is wasted and crawl budget is spent on errors.
Server errors or unreachable pages
Pages that fail with 5xx errors or time out get dropped from Google if the problem persists.
Pages blocked our crawler (firewall or bot protection)
Your firewall or bot protection refused these requests, so they could not be checked. Real visitors and Googlebot usually get the page, but an over-strict setting can also block AI search crawlers and SEO tools.
Error pages that return "200 OK" (soft 404s)
These pages say "not found" but tell Google everything is fine, so dead pages stay in the index and waste crawl budget.
Site loads on both www and non-www
Two addresses serving the same pages split links and rankings between duplicate copies of your site.
Redirect chains (2+ hops)
Each extra hop slows the page and can lose ranking signals.
Internal links to redirected URLs
Linking to a URL that redirects adds a wasted request for every visitor and crawler.
Sitemap lists pages that should not be indexed
Sitemaps should only list live, indexable, canonical URLs. Errors and redirects in a sitemap reduce Google's trust in it.
Pages marked noindex
These pages are hidden from Google on purpose. Make sure none of them are pages you want to rank.
Canonical points to a different URL
Google is told another URL is the main version, so this page will not rank on its own.
Missing canonical tag
Without a canonical, URL variants (tracking parameters, trailing slashes) can split rankings.
Orphan pages (in the sitemap, no internal links)
Pages nobody links to get little ranking value and are hard for visitors to find.
Pages buried more than 3 clicks deep
Important pages far from the home page get crawled less often and rank lower.
No robots.txt file✦ AI fix
robots.txt tells search and AI crawlers what they can access and where your sitemap is.
robots.txt blocks all crawlers✦ AI fix
"Disallow: /" for every user agent hides your whole site from Google and AI search.
No XML sitemap found
A sitemap helps Google and Bing discover new and updated pages faster.
Messy URLs
Short, lowercase, hyphenated URLs are easier to share, read and rank.