SEO Website Audits: Penguin, Panda, Technical

With Google constantly changing their algorithm to eliminate low quality content (Panda Update), sites with structures or metrics that don’t support their large content or product sets or sites that try to manipulate the search results with link schemes or other manipulative tactics (Penguin Update), it is vitally important to do website audits on a regular basis. These audits, much like getting a yearly checkup at your doctor (to combat health issues), can eliminate or minimize the effect of the Google updates on a poorly optimized or site that is not in good health.

To learn more about some of the questions and data points for SEO Audit Process -

1. SEO Technical Analysis -

This analysis will help identify technical (metrics distribution) problems with your website such as duplicate title tags, duplicate content, or if your web pages are returning an incorrect HTTP status code. Below are some more of the data points we check from a technical standpoint to ensure your site is healthy.

• 301 (Permanent) Redirect Analysis
• 302 (Temporary) Redirect Analysis
• 404 (Client Error) Errors
• 500 (Server Error) Errors
• Pages Where The Title is Missing or Empty
• Duplicate Page Content Analysis
• Duplicate Page Title Analysis
• Pages That have Long URLs (> 115 characters)
• Overly-Dynamic URL Analysis
• Meta Refresh Analysis
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Short
• Pages Where the Title Element is Too Long (> 70 Characters)
• Pages Containing Too Many On-Page Links
• Missing Meta Description Tag Analysis
• Robots.txt Analysis
• Meta-robots Nofollow Analysis
• Meta-robots Analysis
• Canonical Tags Analysis
• Indexed URLs Analysis
• Total URLs Receiving Traffic
• Total Keywords Sending Traffic

2. Content Analysis and Panda Audit

Quality content is one of the primary assets your website has when it comes to competing in the search engines for rankings. We conduct the 4 major audits listed below.

• Panda Update Analysis
• Duplicate Content Analysis
• Keyword Analysis

We recently added the Panda Update Analysis after the recent launch of the Panda Update to the Google Algorithm. This analysis combs over your content sets and asks a set of questions to assess the quality and value your content provides. This audit assess if our content is at risk of being devalued by the search engines and caught in the Panda Update. A few of the questions we ask are listed below.

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Does this article have obvious errors?
• Does this article provide additional information beyond what others are saying, and does it present it in a unique way.
• Does this article contain insightful analysis?
• Is this article written by an expert?
• Would you expect to see this article in print?
• Would you give this site your credit card?
• Would you trust medical (replace medical information with your vertical’s information) information from this site.

3. Competitive, Link Analysis and Penguin Update Analysis

This is one of the most important audits for your site since it will uncover keyword ranking issues, possible issues that caused your site to get penalized with the Penguin (Over-optimization) penalty, and who your true online competitive is within the search engines organic search results.

• Identify low value links pointing to your website
• Real Online Competition (usually not who you think)
• Keyword Competition
• Competitive Link Audit
• Export of Your Competitions Link Graph
• Competitive Keyword Difficulty Audit

4. Site Architecture Analysis

The marketing campaigns you are running will drive people to link to your website and share it socially. Your site acquires links, link juice, and social metrics from these campaigns and distributes those metrics internally though the site’s link structure. After we assess the technical parts of your website we want to also make sure that your websites architecture is valuable for metrics distribution.

• Structural Analysis
• Page Rank Flow Analysis
• Internal Anchor Text Analysis