Meta issues
Every Meta finding Crawl Cove's crawler checks for, each with an example finding and a step-by-step fix.
Meta findings cover what a page's head, and your robots rules, tell search engines and browsers before anyone reads the body. Several are Critical or High, because one wrong line can take a page, or a whole site, out of search.
Start with indexing. Robots.txt blocking all crawlers usually means a staging file went live, and a noindex tag or header keeps a single page out of Google. Canonical tags come next: a missing canonical, or one that points at a redirect, a noindexed page or the insecure http:// version, asks a search engine to index a URL other than the one you meant. URL consistency covers uppercase paths and tracking parameters that split one page into several addresses.
The last group is read by browsers and apps rather than ranking systems. A missing viewport tag makes phones render the page at desktop width, a missing or invalid html lang attribute leaves screen readers and translation prompts guessing the language, and incomplete Open Graph tags turn a shared link into a bare URL with no title or image.
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Critical severity
Robots.txt Blocks All Search Engines: How to Fix
A robots.txt that keeps Googlebot or Bingbot off the whole site, usually a staging file that went live. The exact rule to remove, and when it is correct.
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Medium severity
Missing Canonical Tag: What It Costs You
An indexable page with no rel=canonical at all, or one that isn't a valid absolute URL, leaves a search engine to guess which version of the page is real.
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Low severity
URL Consistency: Uppercase and Tracking Params
An uppercase path, a tracking parameter, or two spellings of the same URL each split ranking signal across addresses that should be one page.
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Medium severity
Canonical Pointing to a Redirect, Not the Final URL
An indexable page whose canonical tag lands on a redirect instead of the redirect's final destination, forcing an extra hop before signals consolidate.
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Low severity
Missing or Invalid HTML Lang Attribute
An indexable page whose root <html> tag has no lang attribute, or an invalid one, leaves browsers, screen readers and search engines guessing its language.
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Medium severity
Canonical Pointing to the Insecure HTTP Version
A page served over HTTPS whose canonical tag points at its own insecure http:// address, undoing the HTTPS migration for search engines.
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Low severity
Open Graph Tags Incomplete
A page missing Open Graph or Twitter Card tags renders as a bare link, no title, description or image, when shared on social or in chat.
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Medium severity
Viewport Not Set: The Missing Meta Viewport Tag
An indexable page with no meta viewport tag forces mobile browsers to render it at desktop width and shrink it to fit. Why that happens and how to fix it.
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High severity
Canonical Pointing to a Noindex Page
An indexable page whose canonical tag points at a page that is itself excluded from search, and how it can silently de-index the source page too.
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High severity
Noindex: What It Means and How to Fix It
A page excluded from search by a meta tag or a response header. What it means, an example finding, how to fix it, and when to leave it alone.
Find what is wrong with your site
and how to fix it
Crawl Cove runs on your own computer, explains every issue in plain words and puts the most urgent fixes first. Connect Search Console and it weighs each fix by the traffic on that page.
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