These are industry standard guidelines for optimizing the performance and search engine rankings for web pages based on a ScreamingFrog site crawl. ScreamingFrog is used to crawl the website and export a list of metrics that we use to analyze the site. Below are the different sections we analyze.
- > 200 - These are generally all bad and will not be found, indexed, etc.
- 301’s – just check to ensure you need these
- 302’s, 307’s – are supposed to be temporary, are they still needed (they prevent any indexing)
- = 200 - These are good
- Use Discretion on what should(n't) be indexed
- = "Indexable" - Page is indexed (or at least available to be indexed)
- < > "Non-Indexable" - Not available for Indexing
- 70 - Too Long – Most likely being truncated in your search results listing
- Between 56 and 70 - Average length, 50/50 chance of being truncated
- Between 20 and 56 - These are acceptable. Doesn’t mean perfectly written or optimized, though.
- < 20 - Too Short – Not making good use of the available characters
- > 155 - Too long – Most likely being truncated in your search results listing
- Between 75 and 155 - These are acceptable. Doesn’t mean perfectly written or optimized, though.
- < 75 - Too Short – Not making good use of the available characters
Not important anymore. Site crawlers have devalued these immensely. It doesn't hurt anything to add a few keywords, just keep to the following value guidelines.
- > 100 - Too Long, could be penalized for keyword stuffing (Bing has implemented penalties for too many keywords
- > 75 - Too Long – Doesn’t follow Google guidelines
- Between 50 and 75 - Average, can be improved upon (could be truncated in searches)
- Between 15 and 50 - These are good
- < 15 - Too Short – Not making good use of the available characters
- > 0 - Too Long - You should only have 1 H1 on each page. Additional H1's devalue each other.
- > 70 - Too Long
- Between 10 and 70 - These are good
- < 10 - Too Short
- = "index, follow" - These are good and are being indexed
- < > "index, follow" - These are not properly indexed, valued, and followed by the robots
- Does not contain http - These are either missing canonicals in general or are being canonicalized to an invalid link. Must be a fully qualified static page URL
- i.e. https://www.site.com/services/seo-is-king
This isn’t as important as it is outlining which of the pages are of sufficient length to be a Champion, and which have enough content to be a viable supporting page
- > 900 - Content count adequate, these are good
- Between 500 and 900 - Can be improved upon to become a Champion
- < 500 - Not enough content to be a Champion
How many links/clicks to reach a page from the root page of your site
- > 3 - Too Many
- = 3 - Average, can be improved upon
- < 3 - These are good
- > 3 - Too Long to Load
- Between 2 and 3 - Average, can be improved upon
- < 2 - These are good (or at least within guidelines)
- Blocked by robots.txt – These 1are physically linked to from an accessible page, but then blocked from loading or displaying (i.e. a link to Login would be visible, but the login page could be blocked from indexing, as well as all the pages visible behind the login.
- Usually – There would only be a couple of these types of pages, unless you’re trying to showcase links to reports, etc., but when they’re clicked on, they require a login to view.
- Non-indexable – Just review the pages to ensure that you’re not missing pages that should be indexable SEO content.
- = 301 - Permanent Redirects
- = "non-indexable" - These are good
- = "indexable" - These are bad and should not be indexed
Google needs to be able to render the page completely, including the JavaScript and CSS, to ensure that the page is mobile-friendly and to apply both the mobile-friendly tag in the search results and the associated ranking boost for mobile search results. Unblocking these resources was one of the things that Google was publicly recommending to webmasters to get the mobile-friendly boost for those pages.
However, there are other parts of the algorithm that rely on using it, as well. The page layout algorithm, the algorithm that looks at where content is placed on the page in relation to the advertisements, is one such example. If Google determines a webpage is mostly ads above the fold, with the actual content below the fold, it can devalue the rankings for those pages.
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- = 200 - Properly loading, these are good
- > 400 - Not loading
- = "non-indexable" - CSS should be Indexable
- <> “non-indexable” – Needs to be unblocked with robots.txt
- > 1.5 - Too Long to Load
- < 1.5 - These are good
- < > 200 - These are bad and are not loading properly
- = 200 - These are good
- = "indexable" - These are good. Images can be additional SEO content. Ensure that you’ve named the files with SEO-friendly filenames
- i.e clarity-ecommerce-checkout.jpg
- < > "indexable" - These are bad and are not loading properly
Large banners and retina images will slightly enlarge these values. Use discretion when changing these guidelines
- > 200000 - Too Large. Consider compressing
- Between 150000 and 200000 - Average, can be improved upon
- < 150000 - These are acceptable
- > 2 - Too Long to load
- < 2 - These are within guidelines
- = 200 - These are good
- < > 200 - These are bad and are not properly loading
- = "indexable" - These are good and these files should be indexed. Unblock with the robots.txt. For more information, read the CSS intro paragraphs.
- > 2 - Too long to load
- < 2 - These are within guidelines
- = 200 - These are good and properly loading
- < > 200 - Not properly loading
- = "indexable" - These are good and properly indexed if you want your PDFs to be considered as searchable content for SEO. Doesn’t guarantee that the content is indexed for the onsite search index for CRO. That must be configured with your search module on the site.
- < > "indexable" - These are bad and are not properly indexed
- Java
- > 2 - Too long to load
- < 2 - These are within guidelines