Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and need remediation?

[Joseph.Lusso]

Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and needs remediation? I am being tested for a job interview to prove and/or disprove a website has issues. I am familiar with Moz tools but I'm not sure of the procedure for this request? I am not finding anything online.  The client will be giving a website and I will be doing this audit.

What tools would you use?

What exactly should I be looking for?

What are some obvious fixes?

WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?

[Mike.Bean]

Moz tools will show you all of the crawl issues (Which includes any crawl errors, duplicate content, meta tag errors, robot.txt errors And A LOT more), spammy links, on page seo, bad reviews and many other problems.

I'm not sure what else they would be looking for. Those tools will bring up so many errors (more than likely) Then you just need to learn/explain how to fix these errors.

[Toddfoster]

Hi Joseph,

I will give you a list of the tools I use/have used for auditing purposes of a website and you can pick and choose what you think might be useful:

On-Site - These will help you with on-site penalties (Panda)

1. SEMrush (http://www.semrush.com/)

Beautiful on-site auditing tool. Provides you with knowledge of the site from the perspective of Googlebot and outlines all issues with URL's included so you know where to go/what to fix with minimal involvement from you. It is a monthly subscription service and also incorporates keyword-tracking software, among other things. Deliverables include PDF's and CSV's of data.

2. SEO Powersuite SiteAuditor (www.seopowersuite.com)

This is a one-time cost piece of software. It is less flexible and in-depth than SEMrush in my opinion, but it gets the job done. The primary selling point is that SEO Powersuite provides you with multiple SEO tools for a one-time fee.

Off-Site (Link Profile) - These will help you with off-site penalties (Penguin)

1. Majestic (https://majestic.com/)

Great link-profile tool that allows you to conduct link audits of a website. I use this tool to develop competition analysis reports, and to determine the value of links, whether they are worth keeping, what links I might pursue from competitors, etc. It is a monthly service and you can compare your client's site to others in their niche/industry directly from an off-site perspective. Reports are in CSV format.

2. Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com)

This is a more in-depth tool that many of my co-workers prefer compared to Majestic. They perform much the same service, but Ahrefs has a more extensive database. It is a more "techy" option than Majestic, which is geared more for client presentation.

You will also want to make sure that they are providing you with all the tools you need to conduct the technical audit - GA access, GWT access, etc.

Hope this helps and let me know if you need any further pointers!

Rob

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

My belief is that for ANYWHAT good TECHNICAL audit you will need access to Google Analytics and GWT. Because it's TECHNICAL. And these tools will tell you everything about penalizations etc.

Yes, you can use MOZ, but if you don't have access to historical rankings data - there is no much use to determine anything about penalizations.

The rest is covered by other comments - ahrefs/majestic/OSE for backlink profile, MOZ Rank Tracker for current rankings, webpagetest and PageSpeed for loading times.

And the most important - your own head. Just look at the website. If that website has been penalized - there is huge reason for that and you'd be able to see it just by looking at the website architecture, content etc.

[Joseph.Lusso]

Rob, Thanks very much for this!

GWT is Google Webmaster Tools?

Also, Any pointers and/or specific areas to pay attention to in GA and GWT?

[Joseph.Lusso]

Dmitrii! Thanks very much!

Any pointers and/or specific areas to pay attention to in GA and GWT? Joe

[DmitriiK]

in GA - traffic drop offs, in fact any large changes in any metrics

GWT - manual actions, system messages, security issues

[Toddfoster]

Joseph,

Yes, GWT = Google Webmaster Tools

In GA, you will want to take a look at traffic levels, Bounce Rate, Page views, Time On Page, etc. If any of these metrics show a significant decrease instantaneously (over a couple of days) you can be fairly sure there is something going on from a penalization standpoint. That, or the GA tracking code may have been tampered with during a site redesign. The way to know this is occurring is if your rankings are staying relatively high, but your measured traffic is decreasing drastically. We had a client who went through this just this week - it's a small problem to fix, but it can make your heart race when you think it's a penalty.

GWT will inform you of any penalization taken against your website (if it is manual). If it is algorithmic, your only real warning will be your ranking and traffic drops. Besides that, it is also fairly good for security issues, but these may not be alluded to directly. A great way to determine whether a site is at risk/hacked is to check the link profile - if there is an unnaturally large number of incoming spammy links, there are good odds you are the target of a negative SEO attack, or the site is hacked and being used for spam. Use a site: search to determine if new pages are being created on your sitemap and what they are targeting.

These are worst-case scenarios, so I don't know if you will be tested on them. More likely you will have to make adjustments to some basic on-site ranking factors like H1's or Title Tags.

Feel free to touch base any time if you need additional tips - you can PM me anytime.

Best of luck!