Comment by seanwilson
2 years ago
I run a Chrome extension that gives SEO, speed, and security tips after crawling all the pages of a site:
There's a lot of sentiment on HN about SEO ruining the internet but the SEO tips I promote are ones that make content more readable for humans (e.g. setting image ALT tags, avoiding broken links, giving each page a unique title, using valid HTML) rather than tricks for gaming Google:
Tried running my site through Checkbot, it's lightweight and helpful. "Indexable" pages has been a pain, can't seem to find clarity there on why our stuff is discoverable yet not indexed.
You mean Checkbot is confirming your pages should be indexable as you expect but the pages aren't turning up in Google?
Some general suggestions: add a site map, submit your sitemap and pages via Google Search console, see if changing the internal linking of pages helps (e.g. pages that have links in the header/footer will seem important to crawl/index, maybe hubs for or "related pages" links for related pages would help), get more (and better quality) backlinks, and make sure pages don't look like duplicates (as Google will group together repetitive pages).
Yes that's correct. Regarding your suggestions - thank you! I've done three of the four but still missing back links. We do have 1000s of pages that have a very similar structure, so I would understand why Google would mark them as duplicates, but the content on each differs, so I'm hoping that's not the case.
On-site SEO has a lot of overlap with accessibility and good user experience.