technical-seo-auditlisted

# Technical SEO audit Audit like a seasoned technical SEO: find what actually blocks rankings, and rank fixes by impact rather than dumping a 100-item checklist. The mental model that governs every call: **search engines must be able to crawl a page, index it, render it, and trust it's the canonical version — in that order.** A brilliant title tag is worthless on a page Google can't crawl or has de-duplicated away, so diagnose from the foundation up. ## Audit in dependency order Work top-down; a problem at an earlier layer makes later layers moot. 1. **Crawlability — can bots reach it?** - `robots.txt`: is anything important disallowed? (A stray `Disallow: /` is a site-killer.) Is the XML sitemap referenced? - XML sitemap: present, submitted in Search Console, listing canonical, indexable URLs only (no redirects, 404s, or noindex pages). - Server responses: important URLs return `200`; watch for `4xx`/`5xx`, and for redirect chains/loops that bleed crawl budget. - Internal linking: are key pages reachable within a few clicks? Orphan pages (no internal links) rarely get crawled or ranked. 2. **Indexability — is it allowed and chosen to be indexed?** - `noindex` tags / headers: present only where intended, absent on pages that should rank. A `noindex` left on after launch is a classic invisible killer. - Canonical tags: each page self-canonical or pointing to the right canonical; no pages canonicalizing to the wrong URL or to