sus.botdocs

SEO finding

A page changed, broke or disappeared since the previous crawl

SEO Warning Severity: Medium

Part of the audit Change monitoring. Finding id: seo.pageChangedSincePreviousCrawl.

What it costs you

Changes made by a release, a plugin or a colleague go unseen until the numbers fall.

What to do

Confirm the change was intended. If not, restore the previous value.

What it checks

  • Title, description or heading changed
  • Page text changed
  • Page added or removed
  • Search visibility setting changed
  • Preferred address changed
  • Page status changed

How to fix it

Restore the page or redirect its address

  1. Open [url] in a browser and note what it answers.
  2. Check whether a release or a content edit between the two crawls removed or unpublished the page.
  3. If the page should exist, publish it again and check that other pages link to it.
  4. If it was removed on purpose, redirect the address with a 301 to the page that replaces it.

How to check: Recrawl: the address answers 200, or 301 to its replacement.

Find what took the page out of the index

  1. View the source of [url] and look for a robots meta tag with noindex, and for a canonical tag that names another URL.
  2. Check the response headers for X-Robots-Tag and robots.txt for a rule that matches the address.
  3. If many pages changed at once, look for one cause: a template, a plugin setting or a staging setting that went live.
  4. Remove the block unless it was intended.

How to check: Recrawl the page: it is indexable again.

Confirm or undo the change

  1. Check whether a release, a content edit or a plugin update happened between the two crawls.
  2. If the change was not intended, restore the previous value shown in the finding.

How to check: Recrawl the page: the value is what you expect.