Resolving Technical Insights
Private Beta Feature
SEO & AEO Studio’s Technical page lists insights in the Links and URLs category. After a scan with the Google PageSpeed Insights engine turned on, the page also shows your domain’s Google PageSpeed scores above the insights.
For information about the dashboard and the Insights table, see Reviewing Insights. For information about Insight Details, see Resolving Insights.
Links and URLs Insights
Scans evaluate your domain’s pages for eight distinct insights in the Links and URLs category:
| Insight | Impact | Detection Criteria | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broken Internal Links | High | An internal link points to a URL that returns a 400, 404, 405, or 410 status, redirects without a destination, or is unreachable (connection refused, unresolvable host, or malformed URL). | Update the link to point to the correct destination, or remove it if no equivalent destination exists. If multiple links point to the same missing destination, restore the target URL or configure a redirect to fix them simultaneously. |
| Dead End Pages | Medium | A crawled page’s main content has no internal or external links. | Add relevant internal links (typically two to five) within the page’s main content to guide users to related topics. |
| Orphan Pages | Medium | No other crawled page links to the page. The domain’s home URL is exempt. | Link to the page from two to five related pages, using descriptive anchor text. If no page has a natural place for the link, evaluate whether the page should remain published. |
| Redirect Chains | Medium | An internal link passes through two or more consecutive redirects on the domain’s host before reaching its final URL. | Point the source link or redirect rule directly to the final URL. |
| Redirect Loops | Medium | An internal link’s redirects circle back to a URL they’ve already passed through. | Remove or update the redirect rule closing the loop, and confirm that the final destination returns a 200 status. |
| Unfriendly URLs | Medium | A crawled page’s URL has a query string, an uppercase letter, an overly long path (more than 100 characters or four segments), an all-numeric or UUID segment, or a path character other than a letter, digit, hyphen, period, or slash. URLs that can’t be parsed are also flagged. | Change the URL to a short, lowercase slug using hyphens to separate words. Configure a 301 redirect from the old URL to preserve link equity. See Setting Up Redirects and 404 Tracking. |
| Generic Anchor Text | Low | A text link in the page’s main content consists entirely of one of the generic phrases. | Rewrite the anchor text to describe the destination page. |
| Links Missing Anchor Text | Low | A link in the page’s main content contains no SVG, no image with alt text, and no text beyond punctuation. | Add descriptive anchor text or provide meaningful alt text if the link encloses an image. |
Internal and External Links
The Broken Internal Links, Redirect Chains, and Redirect Loops checks evaluate only internal links. A link counts as internal when its hostname and port match the scanned domain (case-insensitive).
The Dead End Pages, Generic Anchor Text, and Links Missing Anchor Text checks evaluate both internal and external links located within the page’s main content area. Links containing an SVG or an image with alt text bypass the anchor text checks.
To locate the main content area, the scan inspects the DOM for the following elements in priority order: <main>, elements matching [role=main], and <article>. The scan evaluates every matching instance of the first element type it encounters. A page with none of these elements has no main-content links.
Generic Anchor Text Phrases
Generic Anchor Text flags a page when the entire text of a link in its main content matches one of these phrases:
- check it out
- click here
- continue
- continue reading
- details
- download
- find out more
- get started
- go
- here
- info
- learn more
- link
- more
- more details
- more info
- more information
- read more
- see more
- this
- this link
- this page
- view more
- visit
The comparison is case-insensitive, trims extra whitespace, and strips leading or trailing symbols and punctuation.
Google PageSpeed Scores
To collect PageSpeed scores, connect Google PageSpeed Insights and turn on its engine in the Health Scan section. The engine’s Max Pages per Scan setting limits how many pages are tested during each scan.
The Google PageSpeed Metrics (Desktop) card shows four gauges: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Each gauge displays an average score from 0 to 100 across all scored pages, categorized as:
- Good: 90 to 100
- Needs Improvement: 50 to 89
- Poor: 0 to 49
The average excludes pages whose PageSpeed request fails and pages left untested when the engine reaches its Max Duration. For measurement methodologies and definitions, see Google’s PageSpeed Insights documentation.
