Fixing common issues

This page covers the audit issues that appear most often and how to resolve them quickly.

Missing or duplicate canonical tags

What it means: Your page either has no <link rel="canonical"> tag, or multiple pages point to different canonicals creating a conflict.

Fix: Every indexable page should have exactly one self-referencing canonical in the server-rendered HTML:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/the-current-page/" />

For paginated series, the first page should self-canonical; subsequent pages (/page/2/, /page/3/) should canonical to themselves (not page 1, unless you’re consolidating them intentionally).

Pages blocked by robots.txt

What it means: Your robots.txt has a Disallow rule that prevents the crawler from accessing an important page or resource.

Fix: VisibilityIQ generates a corrected robots.txt in the finding. Review the generated file, confirm the Disallow rules are intentional, and deploy it to your site root.

noindex on important pages

What it means: A page that should be indexed has a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> directive or an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header.

Fix: Remove the noindex directive. Be careful — this immediately exposes the page to indexation. If it was noindexed for a reason (thin content, staging page), fix the content first.

Broken internal links (4xx)

What it means: A page on your site links to a URL that returns a 4xx error.

Fix: Either update the link to point to the correct URL, or add a 301 redirect from the broken URL to the correct destination.

Missing H1

What it means: A page has no <h1> tag, or the H1 is only present in the rendered DOM (not the raw HTML).

Fix: Add an H1 to every page in your server-rendered HTML. It should match the page’s primary topic. One H1 per page.

Structured data errors

What it means: JSON-LD on your page has a syntax error, is missing required properties, or claims something the visible content doesn’t support.

Fix: VisibilityIQ shows the exact JSON-LD block that has the issue and a corrected version. Validate the corrected version at schema.org/validator before deploying.

Slow page load (Core Web Vitals)

What it means: Field data from Chrome UX Report shows your LCP, INP, or CLS is above the “good” threshold.

Fix: LCP > 2.5s is most commonly caused by an unoptimized hero image or render-blocking resources. Start with image format (AVIF or WebP), explicit width/height attributes, and fetchpriority="high" on the LCP element. The finding shows the specific element and metric value.

Orphan pages

What it means: A page exists (appears in your sitemap or was found via another method) but has no internal links pointing to it.

Fix: Find contextually relevant pages on your site and add links to the orphaned page. Pages with no internal links receive less crawl budget and no PageRank.