Exploration Can my page be accessed by search engines?
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What is exploration?
In order to index your website in its results, Google needs to visit your website. Its robots browse your pages to understand the context and to link them to a keyword. This is what we call exploration.
If Google cannot access your website, it will have difficulties linking your page to a keyword.
In the Pages section, you will find an exploration report. Our robots work like Google robots.
What is a Robots.txt file?
The Robots.txt file is a text file located at the root of your website (site.com/robots.txt). This file is read by robots before the exploration. It contains indications allowing robots to know if your authorize them or not to explore one or certain pages of your website.
Be careful, indexation and exploration are often confused.
If you don't want a page to be in Google, you need to authorize its exploration in the robots.txt but you need to forbid its indexation (thanks to a tag meta NoIndex).
If you forbid the exploration of the page, Google won't be able to find the NoIndex indication and your page might appear in the SERP.
Generally, there is no interest to use the Robots.txt file except in some specific cases (in order to save a crawl budget for example).
Ensure that pages you want to be in Google are correctly explorable.
If a page is voluntarily not explorable, you can hide this issue in your crawl report and it won't be taken into account in your score.
What is an HTTP error?
An HTTP error is a code returned by the web server when a user wants to access a web page.
When this code is different from 200 (this means that the page is valid) or from 300 to 399 (this means a redirection), we can consider that the code is an error.
Indexability is about allowing or banning the indexation of a page in the search engines, i.e. the possibility for Google to easily explore a page and add it to their results. Various elements can explain why a page isn’t displayed in the results:
Exploration with Robots.txt
The Robot.txt file is a text file situated in the root of the website. It’s imperatively read by each search engine robot before exploring a website. This file contains instructions that authorizes or bans the site to be explored from a folder or a file by certain robots.
It’s often used to voluntarily ban the exploration from certain robots.
If the file doesn’t contain any instructions, the robot will explore the website.
Be careful though, you musn’t use this blocking instruction in the Robots.txt if you want to stop a page from being indexed in the search engines. It’s actually possible that Google indexes the content anyway if it finds links towards this page.
The instruction banning the indexation is the NoIndex instruction found on the page. This way, if the page exploration is banned by the robots.txt, Google will never be able to know that this contained an instruction banning them from indexing it.
The NoIndex instruction bans a page from being indexed in the search engines. It’s important that the engine can explore the page (i.e. the Robots.txt file doesn’t stop it).
There are different ways to ban indexation with the NoIndex:
With the HTML Meta NoIndex tag:
With the HTML Good Googlebot:
With the HTTP X-Robots-tag:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
If the exploration robots come up against simultaneous instructions, they’ll take the most restrictive instruction that they find. No instruction and the robot can index the page.
Content redirections are redirections done after a page has loaded. They should be avoided whenever possible because they can be badly interpreted by search engines and are seen as cloaking techniques (a technique aimed at rigging the search engine results by offering different content for Google and users.
This can be from a Javascript type redirection or a Meta Refresh type redirection towards a different URL.
We recommend you use 301 or 302 redirects rather than content redirections.
A canonical URL defines the favorite URL of the page. It prevents the risk of duplicate content.
For example, some search filters add settings to the URLs: https://website.com/boots.html can become https://website.com/boots.html?color=red during a search.
These are 2 different URLs for the search engines which can be interpreted as duplicate URLs, and so are penalized by the search engines.
A canonical URL is defined in the HTML tag rel=”canonical” as follow:
We recommend you always define one to avoid the risk of content duplication.
Page
Top keywords
This table gathers all the pages with a content very similar to your page.
You should create pages with unique content.
Remarque
Each time you refresh an analysis, the issue is deleted from the table below if the content of a page is not duplicated. The table below might be empty. In order to delete the issue from the page, you need to refresh the analysis.
The page title is the first impression that your users have of your website so that’s why it needs to be attractive to differentiate yourself from the competitor’s sites in the SERP and persuade clicks.
In the Google search results the space allowed for each result is limited to a frame of 600px wide including various elements such as the page title.
If the title exceeds this 600px, it’s automatically changed by Google. In some rare situations Google can also decide to change the title if it doesn’t find it pertinent enough.
To make sure your title is displayed correctly, it’s vital that its length doesn’t exceed 600px. With each character not having the same width (“o“ takes up more space than “i“ for example), we recommend you keep to the ideal length of around 55 characters.
Here is our advice for your page title optimization:
Your titles must be written to seduce the user. Go for catchy titles and avoid just listing keywords.
Don’t use the same title for several pages. Each title must be unique.
Add the search keyword at the beginning of the title if possible.
Use adjectives and keywords to specify the subject of your page. Users jazz-up their searches with keywords that are precise and specific to their request and they expect to see them in the SERP.
Targeted keywords also differentiate yourself in the search results. For example: “icon flat design“ vs. “best icon flat design 2018“.
Shape your title to the image of your site, choose keywords that are used by internet users, and make them catchy and concise. By putting time aside to write them you will make the difference in the SERP.
The content of the meta description tag is displayed underneath the title in the results page and is separate from the title. The meta description is the first informative text that the visitor reads to see if the page content gives them the answer to their request.
Remember that the meta description must first seduce the visitor and be a CTA (call-to-action). It’s important that this description is eye-catching and makes the visitor want to click.
We recommend you:
Respect the space allowed by Google in the SERP, your meta description must not exceed 300 characters without the risk of it being shortened.
Use keywords related to the user’s search in the description.
Write an attractive and click-encouraging text. The meta description has no direct impact on Google’s algorithm ranking but it does influence the user’s behavior.
Avoid words in capitals and special characters to just attract attention. The description must be qualitative.
Optimizing content keywords is a very delicate task and often misunderstood. You need to ensure the content corresponds to the keywords searched otherwise Google won’t be able to easily see the link between the search and content, whilst making sure the content can be read by the user.
Here is our main advice for optimizing content keywords:
Offer a minimum of content. We recommend a minimum of 400-500 keywords per page. In some cases it’s not always necessary to reach this threshold, this amount just lets you use a sufficient amount of keywords, so that search engines can establish a search match (indexation).
Show-off your search words. It’s better to highlight the chosen terms through the HTML markup, for example in the titles, in bold or in the image alternative texts. Don’t over-optimize a keyword, i.e. repeating it in an unnatural way or exaggeratedly mark it up (this is also called Keyword Stuffing).
Use synonyms. Now, search engines tend to move towards understanding the language and creating relationships between different words in different contexts. Using synonyms allows you to better position yourself on long-tail searches (i.e. search with more precise keywords).
Sometimes it’s worth adding spelling mistakes. Surprisingly some keywords are often searched by users with spelling mistakes. It can sometimes be strategic to add these mistakes into your content so that you can be better positioned in the search results as Google doesn’t have an automatic correction feature.
We analyze the number of times a keyword appears on a page by calculating its weighted density. The weighted density is calculated by the number of times the keyword appears as well as its added-value (in a title, bold, in a link, etc).
We consider that an over-optimized keyword is when the density (or repetition) exceeds 8%.
Heading tags are titles displayed in the content through the HTML tags: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. There are 6 levels of titles (title, subtitle, sub-subtitle, etc).
It’s best to respect the semantic meaning of these titles: their order as well as their size.
We often notice that a lot of websites use titles in the wrong order because of the ease of use in CSS styles.
The recommended structure is as follows:
H1
--H2
--H2
----H3
----H3
--H2
With the H1 title representing the page content, we recommend placing related keywords in it. It’s possible to have several H1 titles per page if the page contains lots of different content, but this technique makes optimization more difficult.
So, it’s recommended that the H1 title is the title written in the biggest font. Google inspects the size of the texts so it can visually check which is the real title seen by the user, i.e. often the first and biggest.
Images give a visual and unwritten representation of an idea, a concept or an object. Having at least one image per page can brighten-up the aesthetics and/or the understanding of the content, and also increase the SEO potential of a page.
As the search engine robots are still limited in understanding images, it’s important to provide them with a textual description of the image, which is called Alternative Text.
Each image content must have an alternative text. This alternative text is put in using the attribute HTML alt=” in the image tag.
For example:
Our advice when using images:
Include at least one image that represents the content
Add the most descriptive alternative text as possible to each image
Give a clear title to the names of image files
Diversify the Alt attributes
If you have an e-commerce website for example, the current trend consists of showing various different angles of the product to make it appealing. Each alternative text must be unique, it is therefore essential that you adapt the alternative text content for each image.
For example:
By doing this you are giving more information to Google to understand the subject of your page as well as the contents of the images.
It’s worth noting that in some cases Google takes into account the text just before and after the image contents in order to check if the alternative text is pertinent enough.
Structured data is a markup format within a website’s code that helps search engines understand the page content more accurately. By using standardized tags such as those from Schema.org, structured data allows search engines to better interpret the information and display it in enriched formats in search results, such as rich snippets, knowledge cards, and more. Adding structured data is crucial for improving a site’s visibility and click-through rate, as it helps stand out in search results. To integrate structured data, simply add the specific tags into the page’s HTML code, either using the JSON-LD format (the most recommended) or directly embedding microdata in the HTML. Many online tools, like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, make it easy to create and validate this markup.
The server speed corresponds to the time it takes for the server to load a page, between the moment it receives a page request and where it starts to send the page content. The time doesn’t depend on the quality of the connection or the geographical location of the server (latency), but only on the performance of the server calculation.
The server response time can largely affect the position of a site in the search results, either because Google thinks the site is too long to be displayed, or because users don’t have the patience to wait for the page to load.
We recommend a server response time inferior to 200ms.
There can be several solutions to improve the server response time:
Choose the most performing server
Find the scripts slowing-down the page loading time (or certain Wordpress modules for example by deactivating them one after another)
On the server side, activate caching on HTML pages when possible
Use a Load Balancing to reduce the server load by spreading it out over several servers.
There are a number of techniques that help improve the server speed but they depend upon technical constraints and must be studied with a specialized technician.
Your page has a total weight (HTML and resources) of kb.
requests need to be download to display the page.
/ textual resources are compressed.
This page uses the protocol:
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URL
Type
Transfer size
Compression
Protocol
Page weight
The best way to have a fast page is to keep an eye on the weight of elements that need to be downloaded. To display a page, the browser needs to download a HTML file as well as its dependencies (CSS, Javascript, Ajax, etc). We don’t apply criteria onto the weight because this criteria depends on the proposed content. Of course, the weight will be higher on a marriage photography site than a site with documentation text. We recommend you reduce the weight of elements needed to be downloaded as much as possible.
Number of requests
The number of requests corresponds to the number of elements that need to be downloaded to display the page. It’s recommended to reduce the number of requests as much as possible. We recommend you don’t exceed more than 100 requests per page if possible.
Resource compression
Compressing resources reduce the weight to be downloaded without changing the file weight: the server compresses the file before sending it (as a .zip file), sends it to the client’s browser which decompresses it. It’s therefore possible to reduce the volume of data to be downloaded by up to 90%.
We highly recommend you to enable compression of textual resources (html, css, javascript, svg, json, xml...).
You can find a complete guide of resource compression in this Google article.
HTTP2
HTTP2 is a protocol created in 2015 which considerably accelerates the page and resources’ loading time. It allows among other things to compress the headers, to load useful resources quicker and even multiplex the connection to be able to download several resources at once.
We recommend you to activate the HTTP2 protocol.
We’ve found request(s) in HTTP and request(s) in HTTPS in this page.
Your SSL certificate: Expiration date:
HTTPS
As Google says: “You should always protect all of your websites with HTTPS, even if they don’t handle sensitive communications.”
HTTPS allows you to activate a secure communication between the site and the user. This connection needs a certificate which allows you to activate and authenticate a secure connection.
Be careful that your certificate doesn’t expire. Once expired, your users will be redirected towards a browser page saying that the connection isn’t secure.
If you want to activate HTTPS, also don’t forget to redirect all your HTTP URLs towards HTTPS with a 301 redirect so you don’t lose your ranking.
out of images on your page are very heavy. (Total weight of images is kb).
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Src
Transfer size
If images aren’t optimized this can quickly explain why your page loading time is slowing-down.
Optimizing an image corresponds with its online format:
Make sure they aren’t bigger than their format displayed on a screen
Make sure their quality is adapted to the web
Avoid PNG formats if possible when the images don’t contain any transparency as these formats are a lot heavier than JPG