SEO finding
A new section of the site is about a high-risk topic the rest of the site is not about
SEO Warning Severity: High
Part of the audit Change monitoring. Finding id: seo.newSectionOffTopic.
What it costs you
Search engines can treat third-party content placed on a site to borrow its reputation as spam, and act against the section or the whole site. A section nobody in the team knows about can also mean the site was hacked.
What to do
Find out who published the section and why. If it is not yours, remove it and check the site for a break-in. If it is a third party's content, read Google's spam policies on site reputation abuse before keeping it.
What it checks
- New section off topic
How to fix it
Check who owns the new section
- Open [example url] and the other pages in /[section]/.
- Ask who in the team or which partner published them.
- If nobody did, treat it as a break-in: remove the pages, change the CMS passwords and check for other changes.
- If a partner did, decide with them whether it belongs on this site; if not, move it to their own domain.
How to check: Recrawl the site: the section is gone, or the finding is dismissed with the reason.
Thresholds
| Name | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
min_section_pages | 3 | A new section needs at least this many pages on a high-risk topic. |
max_site_share | 0.05 | The topic is off-topic when fewer than this share of the site's other pages are on it. |