How to Find Common SEO Problems
Most websites share the same handful of SEO problems, and almost all of them can be found by reading what the site itself serves. This guide lists the recurring issues in rough order of importance and shows how to detect each one with free tools — starting with the SEO Checker, the HTTP Status Checker and the SSL / HTTPS Checker.
1. Pages that block search engines entirely
A page marked noindex tells crawlers not to list it. That is correct for privacy pages and admin areas, but catastrophic when applied sitewide by accident — a common misconfiguration after template or plugin changes. Detection: run the SEO Checker on your homepage and check the robots instruction. If it says noindex, open your HTML source and find where the meta tag is coming from.
2. Errors and redirect loops on important pages
If an important URL returns 404 by mistake, or a redirect chain cycles forever, crawlers give up. Detection: run the HTTP Status Checker on your homepage, your main product or category pages, and your blog. Follow the chain shown until it ends in a 2xx. Two or fewer hops is typical; four or more is worth simplifying.
3. Misconfigured HTTPS and mixed content
Browsers increasingly flag mixed content — HTTPS pages that load resources over HTTP. These pages still work, but the browser may show a security warning, and the request often gets blocked entirely, which can silently break features. Detection: the SSL / HTTPS Checker reports whether HTTP redirects to HTTPS and flags mixed-content references found in the page HTML.
4. Duplicate content and canonical problems
Reachable-at-multiple-URLs content (with www vs without, with and without trailing slashes or tracking parameters) confuses crawlers. Detection: the SEO Checker reports whether a canonical tag exists and whether it matches the current URL. Oddly, many sites either omit the tag entirely or point it at the wrong URL after changing domains. The canonical guide covers the fix.
5. Weak or missing titles and meta descriptions
Title tags are among the strongest on-page signals, and meta descriptions shape the snippet shown in results. Typical problems: titles too long (browsers and results cut them off), identical titles across pages, and missing descriptions. Detection: the SEO Checker parses the real title and meta description from the page — it reports the exact character counts and duplicates it detects across checks.
6. Broken internal links and orphan content
Internal links distribute authority and help crawlers discover pages. Problems here are either dead links (pointing at pages that no longer exist) or orphan pages (great content that no page links to). Detection: the SEO Checker counts internal and external links on a page; for orphans, review your site’s navigation and footer to make sure every meaningful page is reachable from somewhere.
7. Missing alt text and unoptimized images
Images without alt attributes lose context for both accessibility and image search. Detection: the SEO Checker lists how many images lack alt text. Fixing alt text is cheap and improves the page for everyone.
8. robots.txt and sitemap.xml problems
The most common issues: robots.txt blocking resources that should be crawlable, a sitemap that lists noindex or 404 pages, and sitemap URLs that redirect instead of returning 200. Detection: the SEO Checker fetches both files and tells you whether they are retrievable; open the sitemap itself and spot-check a few URLs with the HTTP Status Checker.
Prioritize by impact, not by count
An audit that lists 200 issues is worse than useful — it hides the three that matter. Fix in this order: (1) access blockers (noindex accidents, errors, HTTPS problems), (2) duplicate-content and redirect issues, (3) page-level metadata, (4) everything else. Re-check after each fix; templates fix many pages at once.