SEO

The SEO check visits the sites you declare, the way a search engine would, and tells you what keeps your pages from being found. It is not a score: it is a list of concrete problems, each with its evidence. In the SEO menu you find three pages: Sites, Findings and Pages.

Declare a site

1. Open Sites and press Add site.
2. Pick Project and Environment. The project must have the Web platform. Each project has one site per environment, and after creation project and environment cannot change.
3. Write the Site address: the visit starts here. It must be a public address.
4. Pick How often to check it (every day or every week) and the Pages per run, 1,000 at most.
5. Leave Read the sitemap on if the site has one, then press Add.

The first check starts right away. Check now starts one at any time.

How it visits the site

• It starts from the home page and the sitemap, follows internal links and stops at the number of pages you picked.
• It always honours the robots.txt file and stays on the address you gave it.
• It identifies itself as CloseYourItBot and waits half a second between pages.
• It reads pages as the server sends them, before the browser runs any code: that is what a search engine sees on the first pass.

It does not use Google Search Console and does not judge how well the text is written.

Findings

Each finding is a problem found on a page, or on the whole site. It has a severity (Low, Medium, High, Critical) and an area: Indexability, Structure, Content, Languages, Performance.

Some examples of what it looks for:

• pages with the noindex instruction, pages that do not answer, endless or too long redirects;
• official address (canonical) missing or pointing elsewhere;
• sitemap or robots.txt not answering, pages missing from the sitemap or linked by no one;
• title or description missing, too long or the same on several pages;
• main heading (H1) missing or doubled, language not declared, language versions that do not point back to each other;
• nearly empty pages, images without a description, slow or too heavy pages.

Opening a finding you see The evidence: which page, what was there and what should have been.

Decide what to do

• Open a ticket creates a pre-filled ticket (see Tickets).
• Live with it sets the finding aside. Reopen puts it back on the list.
• When the problem disappears from the site, the finding closes itself at the next check.

If a page cannot be read, its problems stay open: what was not seen is not declared fixed.

Pages

Pages lists every page seen in the last check: what each one answered, title, main heading, how many words it holds, official address and response time.

Site speed

In a site's Speed tab you find the Web Vitals of the home page, Google's speed measures, on phone and on computer:

• Lab: a test run on a Google machine. It tells you why the site is slow.
• Field: what really happened to people who opened the site, over the last 28 days. It is the number Google looks at for ranking.

The measures are Content appears, Response to touch, Page shifts, Server wait and First sign of life, plus the Performance, Accessibility, Best practices and SEO scores. They are measured as often as the check runs.

The measures need a Google PageSpeed key:

1. In the Google Cloud console enable the PageSpeed Insights service and create a key.
2. An organization admin connects Google PageSpeed from the Integrations page.

Without the key the site is not measured, and the tab says so.

Alerts

Alerts go out only for new findings of High or Critical severity (see Alerts). The others are there to read on the page when you have time.