2 builders who never spoke to each other

Run the same short crawl on every site you own

Keep a fixed shortlist so an audit is repeatable in minutes: canonicals missing or aimed at staging, mixed content, internal links into redirects and errors, titles far too short or long, and last year's branding still on best-of guides. Billion-dollar publishers ship all of these. Open pages of different types rather than a hundred from one template, and use site queries plus the Internet Archive to find what the owner forgot.

The method

1. 01

   Crawl your own site for the same short list of faults that billion-dollar publishers still ship: canonicals aimed at staging, homepage links into server errors, old posts with no title tag, and best-of guides still branded to last year.

2. 02

   Check for text you are repeating across your own site by searching the exact phrase in quotes with the site: operator restricted to your domain.

3. 03

   Find the junk pages Google has indexed on any site by combining a site: search with inurl: filters on words that betray leftovers: demo, test, sample, portfolio, landing, screenshot and home.

4. 04

   Highlight the nofollow links on a page before you value a link placement, including the footer credits designers leave on client sites.

5. 05

   Run a free duplicate content and broken page scan with Siteliner before reaching for a paid crawler, since a couple of hundred URLs is usually enough to see the pattern.

What it returned

• 500

  Glen Allsopp found canonicals pointing at a staging domain on WebMD, homepage links returning server errors on Greatist, Latin placeholder text still live on Popular Mechanics, a footer RSS link throwing a 500 on GQ, author URLs with a double slash canonicalising away on Games Radar, and a sitemap canonicalising through a redirect with stale year links on ZDNet; several were fixed within days of his report.

• 5

  Glen Allsopp uses it a few times on every site he audits and reckons it saves 5 to 15 seconds each time, which adds up across an audit. The same query without the site: operator checks for plagiarism.

• 2005

  Glen Allsopp credits Joel Birch with the original idea and had it modified so it no longer needs jQuery on the page, and so the highlighted links render larger. The nofollow attribute was introduced by search engines in 2005.

• Glen Allsopp says those URL patterns usually turn out to be leftover theme files, half-finished posts or thin pages that should never have been indexed. It is the bookmarklet he reaches for most often.

Sources

• Advanced Chrome Bookmarks for SEOs: A Detailed Guide | Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Quickly Check for Plagiarism (Or Duplicate Content) on Any Website in Google · 2019-04-18
• How 16 Companies are Dominating the World's Google Search Results (2024 Edition) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Sites Owned By Digital Goliaths Still Make a Lot of Mistakes (Not a Critique, But Rather a Reality Check). Here’s 15 of Them… · 2023-03-07
• Generating Six-Figure Profits from $40 SEO Audits: A Detailed Guide - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Site-Searching Google (Typically 2-3 Minutes) · 2022-12-17
• CD Baby's confirmation emailHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · CD Baby's confirmation email · undated