Having broken pages on your site is never good. If these pages have backlinks, they are effectively wasted because they point to nothing. You can also find broken URLs with backlinks in Site Explorer. Just plug in your domain, go to the Best by links report, and add a “404 not found” filter. Then sort the report by referring domains from high to low. Broken internal pages in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer sorted by referring domains Here’s our recommended process for dealing with broken links: Flowchart showing how to deal with broken links, via Ahrefs Blog 8. Ensure your sitemap doesn’t have any issues A sitemap lists the pages you want search engines to index. It shouldn’t list things like redirects, non-canonicals, or dead pages because those send mixed signals to Google.
Ensure on-page elements conform to SEO best practices
Every indexable page on your site should have a title tag, meta description, and H1 tag. These basic on-page elements help Google understand your content and help you to win more clicks from your category email list rankings. To check for issues, head to the “Issues” tab in the Content report in Site Audit. Basic on-page issues in Ahrefs’ Site Audit For example, the website above has 724 pages with a missing or empty title tag. This isn’t ideal because Google shows them in the search results, so the site could be consequently missing out on clicks. It also has the same number of pages with an empty or missing meta description and thousands with a missing or empty H1 tag. Google often shows meta descriptions in the search results, so you should try to
Find declining content to reclaim rankings
Rankings don’t last forever. As content becomes outdated, its search traffic will often start to drop off. But you can usually resurrect Email Data rankings by refreshing and republishing the content. For example, our list of top Google searches declined massively in 2021. Estimated organic search traffic to our list of top Google searches This is because we didn’t update the post for over a year, so the content became outdated. Once we republished the piece, however, we saw a spike in organic traffic. Here’s an easy way to find declining content in Google Search Console: Go to the Search results report Set the date filter to compare mode Choose “Compare last 6 months to previous period” Click the “Pages” tab Sort the table by “
