Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide [2024]
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Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide

This is a complete guide to technical SEO.

In this all-new guide you’ll learn all about:

  • Crawling and indexing
  • XML sitemaps
  • Duplicate content
  • Structured data
  • Hreflang
  • Lots more

So if you want to make sure that your technical SEO is up to speed, you should get a lot of value from today’s guide.

Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1:Technical SEO Fundamentals

Technical SEO Fundamentals

Let’s kick things off with a chapter on the basics.

Specifically, in this chapter, I’m going to cover why technical SEO is still SUPER important in 2024.

I’ll also show you what is (and isn’t) considered “technical SEO”.

Let’s dive in.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Important elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

You can have the best site with the best content.

But if your technical SEO is messed up?

Then you’re not going to rank.

At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render and index the pages on your website.

Search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render & index the pages on your website

But that’s just scratching the surface. Even if Google DOES index all of your site’s content, that doesn’t mean your job is done.

That’s because, for your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO, your site’s pages need to be secure, mobile optimized, free of duplicate content, fast-loading… and a thousand other things that go into technical optimization.

That’s not to say that your technical SEO has to be perfect to rank. It doesn’t.

But the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better chance you have to rank.

How Can You Improve Your Technical SEO?

Like I said, “Technical SEO” isn’t just crawling and indexing.

To improve your site’s technical optimization, you need to take into account:

And I’m probably forgetting a few 🙂

Fortunately, I’m going to cover all of those things (and more) in the rest of this guide.

Chapter 2:Site Structure and Navigation

Site Structure and Navigation

In my opinion, your site’s structure is “step #1” of any technical SEO campaign.

(Yes, even coming before crawling and indexing)

Why?

First off, many crawling and indexing issues happen because of poorly-designed site structure. So if you get this step right you don’t need to worry as much about Google indexing all of your site’s pages.

Second, your site structure influences everything else you do to optimize your site… from URLs to your sitemap to using robots.txt to block search engines from certain pages.

The bottom line here is this: a strong structure makes every other technical SEO task MUCH easier.

With that, let’s get into the steps.

Use a Flat, Organized Site Structure

Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organized.

In general, you want a structure that’s “flat”. In other words: your site’s pages should all be only a few links away from one another.

Flat site structure

Why is this important?

A flat structure makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl 100% of your site’s pages.

A flat structure makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl

This isn’t a big deal for a blog or local pizza shop website. But for an ecommerce site with 250k product pages? A flat architecture is a BIG deal.

You also want your structure to be super organized.

In other words, you don’t want a site architecture like this:

Bad site structure

This messy structure usually creates “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links pointing to them).

Orphan pages

It also makes it hard to ID and fix indexing issues.

You can use the Semrush “Site Audit” feature to get a bird’s eye view of your site structure.

Semrush – Site structure

This is helpful. But it’s not super visual.

To get a more visual look at how your pages are linked together, check out Visual Site Mapper.

It’s a free tool that gives you an interactive look at your site’s architecture.

Consistent URL Structure

There’s no need to overthink your URL structure. Especially if you run a small site (like a blog).

That said: you do want your URLs to follow a consistent, logical structure. This actually helps users understand “where” they are on your site.

Consistent URL structure

And putting your pages under different categories gives Google extra context about each page in that category.

Give Google context about each page

For example, the pages on our SEO Marketing Hub all include the “/hub/seo” subfolder to help Google know that all of these pages are under the “SEO Marketing Hub” category.

SEO Marketing Hub – Structure

Which seems to work. If you Google “SEO Marketing Hub”, you’ll notice that Google adds sitelinks to the results.

SEO Marketing Hub – Sitelinks

As you might expect, all of the pages linked to from these sitelinks are inside of the hub.

Breadcrumbs Navigation

It’s no secret that breadcrumbs navigation is super SEO-friendly.

That’s because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to category and subpages on your site.

Breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to your site

Which helps solidify your site architecture.

Not to mention the fact that Google has turned URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation in the SERPs.

Google search results – Breadcrumb-style URLs

So when it makes sense, I recommend using breadcrumbs navigation.

Chapter 3:Crawling, Rendering and Indexing

Crawling, rendering and indexing

This chapter is all about making it SUPER easy for search engines to find and index your entire site.

In this chapter I’ll show you how to find and fix crawl errors… and how to send search engine spiders to deep pages on your website.

Spot Indexing Issues

Your first step is to find any pages on your site that search engine spiders have trouble crawling.

Here are 3 ways to do that.


Coverage Report

Your first stop should be the “Coverage Report” in the Google Search Console.

This report lets you know if Google is unable to fully index or render pages that you want indexed.

Google Search Console – Coverage report

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is the world’s most famous crawler for a reason: it’s really, really good.

So once you’ve fixed any issues in the Coverage Report, I recommend running a full crawl with Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog – Crawl

Semrush Site Audit

Semrush has a sneaky good SEO site audit tool.

Semrush – Site audit

What I like most about this feature is that you get info on your site’s overall technical SEO health.

SEMrush – Site health

Site performance report.

SEMrush – Site performance

And issues with your site’s HTML tags.

Semrush – Backlinko – Site audit – Warnings

Each of these 3 tools have their pros and cons. So if you run a large site with 10k+ pages, I recommend using all three of these approaches. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.

Internal Link to “Deep” Pages

Most people don’t have any issues getting their homepage indexed.

It’s those deep pages (pages that are several links from the homepage) that tend to cause problems.

Deep pages: Several links from the homepage

A flat architecture usually prevents this issue from happening in the first place. After all, your “deepest” page will only be 3-4 clicks from your homepage.

Either way, if there’s a specific deep page or set of pages that you want indexed, nothing beats a good old-fashioned internal link to that page.

Internal link to important pages from authority sites

Especially if the page you’re linking from has a lot of authority and gets crawled all the time.

Use an XML Sitemap

In this age of mobile-first indexing and AMP does Google still need an XML sitemap to find your site’s URLs?

Yup.

In fact, a Google rep recently stated that XML sitemaps are the “second most important source” for finding URLs.

Google: XML Sitemaps are the second most important source

(The first? They didn’t say. But I’m assuming external and internal links).

If you want to double check that your sitemap is all good, head over to the “Sitemaps” feature in the Search Console.

Google Search Console – Sitemaps feature

This will show you the sitemap Google is seeing for your site.

Google Search Console – Sitemap page

GSC “Inspect”

Is a URL on your site not getting indexed?

Well, the GSC’s Inspect feature can help you get to the bottom of things.

Not only will it tell you why a page isn’t getting indexed…

Google Search Console – Reason for noindex

But for pages that ARE indexed, you can see how Google renders the page.

Google Search Console – Live page render

That way, you can double check that Google is able to crawl and index 100% of the content on that page.

Chapter 4:Thin and Duplicate Content

Thin and Duplicate Content

If you write unique, original content for every page on your site then you probably don’t need to worry about duplicate content.

That said:

Duplicate content can technically crop up on any site… especially if your CMS created multiple versions of the same page on different URLs.

And it’s the same story with thin content: it’s not an issue for most websites. But it can hurt your overall site’s rankings. So it’s worth finding and fixing.

And in this chapter I’m going to show you how to proactively fix duplicate and thin content issues on your site.

Use an SEO Audit Tool to Find Duplicate Content

There are two tools that do a GREAT job at finding duplicate and thin content.

The first is the Raven Tools Site Auditor.

It scans your site for duplicate content (or thin content). And lets you know which pages need to be updated.

Raven Tools – Duplicate Content

The Semrush site audit tool also has a “Content Quality” section that shows you if your site has the same content on several different pages.

Semrush – Site audit – Duplicate content

That said:

These tools focus on duplicate content on your own website.

“Duplicate content” also covers pages that copy content from other sites.

To double-check that your site’s content is unique, I recommend Copyscape’s “Batch Search” feature.

Here’s where you upload a list of URLs and see where that content appears around the web.

Copyscape – Batch search

If you find a snippet of text that shows up on another site, search for that text in quotes.

If Google shows your page first in the results, they consider you the original author of that page.

Search for text snippet

And you’re good to go.

Note: If other people copy your content and put it on their website, that’s their duplicate content problem. Not yours. You only need to worry about content on your site that’s copied (or super similar) to content from other websites.

Noindex Pages That Don’t Have Unique Content

Most sites are going to have pages with some duplicate content.

And that’s OK.

This becomes a problem when those duplicate content pages are indexed.

The solution? Add the “noindex” tag to those pages.

The noindex tag tells Google and other search engines to not index the page.

The noindex tag

You can double check that your noindex tag is set up correctly using the “Inspect URL feature” in the GSC.

Pop in your URL and click “Test Live URL”.

Google Search Console – Test live URL

If Google is still indexing the page, you’ll see a “URL is available to Google” message. Which means that your noindex tag isn’t set up correctly.

Google Search Console – URL is available

But if you see an “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” message, then the noindex tag is doing its job.

Google Search Console – Excluded by noindex tag

(This is one of the few times you WANT to see a red error message in the GSC 🙂 )

Depending on your crawl budget, it can take a few days or weeks for Google to re-crawl the pages you don’t want indexed.

So I recommend checking the “Excluded” tab in the Coverage report to make sure your noindexed pages are getting removed from the index.

Google Search Console – Excluded pages

For example, certain posts at Backlinko have paginated comments.

Backlinko – Paginated comments

And every single comments page has the original blog post on it.

Backlinko – Comments pages have original post on them

If those pages got indexed by Google, we’d have duplicate content issues up the wazoo.

Which is why we add a noindex tag to every single one of those pages.

Noindex HTML

Note: You can also block search engine spiders from crawling the page altogether by blocking their individual crawlers in your robots.txt file.

Use Canonical URLs

Most pages that have duplicate content on them should get the ol’ no index tag added to them. Or have the duplicate content replaced with unique content.

But there’s a third option: canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are perfect for pages that have very similar content on them… with minor differences between pages.

For example, let’s say you run an ecommerce site that sells hats.

And you have a product page set up just for cowboy hats.

Product page

Depending on how your site is set up, every size, color and variation can result in different URLs.

Different URL for every size, color and variation

Not good.

Fortunately, you can use the canonical tag to let Google know that the vanilla version of your product page is the “main” one. And all the others are variations.

Use the canonical tag

Chapter 5:PageSpeed

PageSpeed

Improving your pagespeed is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can directly impact your site’s rankings.

That’s not to say that a fast-loading site will rocket you to the top of Google’s first page.

(You need backlinks for that)

But improving your site’s loading speed can make a significant dent in your organic traffic.

And in this chapter I’ll show you 3 simple ways to boost up your site’s loading speed.

Reduce Web Page Size

CDNs. Cache. Lazy loading. Minifying CSS.

I’m sure you’ve read about these approaches a thousand times before.

But I don’t see nearly as many people talk about a page speed factor that’s just as important:

Web page size.

In fact, when we ran our large-scale pagespeed study, we found that a page’s total size correlated with load times more than any other factor.

Factors that impact fully loaded on desktop and mobile

The takeaway here is this:

When it comes to pagespeed, there’s no free lunch.

You can compress images and cache the heck out of your site.

But if your pages are huge, then they’re going to take a while to load.

This is something we struggle with here at Backlinko. Because we use lots of high-res images, our pages tend to be ginormous.

Google Page Speed – Avoid enormous payloads

I make the conscious decision to live with slower loading times. I rather have a slow, awesome-looking page vs. a fast page with grainy images.

Which does hurt our scores on Google PageSpeed Insights.

Google Page Speed Insights – Poor score

But if improving your site speed is a top priority, then you want to do whatever you can to slim down your page’s total size.

Test Load Times With and Without a CDN

One of the most surprising findings from our pagespeed study was that CDNs were associated with worse load times.

Use of CDN correlates with worse desktop page speed

This is likely because many CDNs aren’t set up correctly.

So if your site uses a CDN, I recommend testing your site’s speed on webpagetest.org with the CDN on or off.

Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts

Each 3rd party script that a page has adds an average of 34ms to its load time.

Third-party scripts negatively impact page load times

Some of these scripts (like Google Analytics), you probably need.

But it never hurts to look over your site’s scripts to see if there’s any that you can get rid of.

Chapter 6:Extra Technical SEO Tips

Extra Technical SEO Tips

Now it’s time for some quick technical SEO tips.

In this chapter we’ll cover redirects, structured data, Hreflang, and more.

Implement hreflang for International Websites

Does your site have different versions of your page for different countries and languages?

Versions for different countries and languages

If so, the hreflang tag can be a HUGE help.

The only issue with the hreflang tag?

It’s tough to set up. And Google’s documentation on how to use it isn’t super clear.

Hreflang – Documentation

Enter: Aleyda Solis’ Hreflang Generator Tool.

Aleyda Solis – Hreflang generator tool

This tool makes it (relatively) easy to create an hreflang tag for multiple countries, languages and regions.

Aleyda Solis – Hreflang generator instructions

Check Your Site for Dead Links

Having a bunch of dead links on your site won’t make or break your SEO.

In fact, Google even said that broken links are “not an SEO problem”.

But if you have broken internal links?

That’s another story.

Broken internal links can make it harder for Googlebot to find and crawl your site’s pages.

Broken links prevent Googlebot from crawling a site's pages

So I recommend doing a quarterly SEO audit that includes fixing broken links.

You can find your site’s broken links using pretty much any SEO audit tool, like Semrush:

SEMrush – Broken links

Or Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog – Link status

As you can see, I don’t have any problems. What can I say? I’m good at SEO 😉

And…

You can follow this step-by-step backlink audit on your site and acquire similar results.

Set up Structured Data

Do I think that setting up Schema directly helps your site’s SEO?

No.

In fact, our search engine ranking factors study found no correlation between Schema and first page rankings.

Presence of Schema Markup

That said:

Using Schema CAN give some of your pages Rich Snippets.

And because Rich Snippets stand out in the SERPs, they can dramatically improve your organic click through rate.

Rich Snippets stand out in search results

Validate Your XML Sitemaps

If you run a huge site, it’s hard to keep track of all of the pages in your sitemap.

In fact, many sitemaps that I look at have pages with 404 and 301 status codes. Considering that the main goal of your sitemap is to show search engines all of your live pages, you want 100% of the links in your sitemap to point to live pages.

So I recommend running your sitemap through the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator.

Just enter a sitemap from your site.

iPullRank – Sitemap validator

And see if any of your links are broken or redirecting.

iPullRank – Results showing error

Noindex Tag and Category Pages

If your site runs on WordPress, I highly recommend noindexing category and tag pages.

(Unless, of course, those pages bring in lots of traffic).

These pages don’t usually add much value to users. And they can cause duplicate content issues.

If you use Yoast, you can easily noindex these pages with a single click.

Yoast SEO – Single-click noindex

Check for Mobile Usability Issues

Google’s mobile first indexing initiative is finally complete. So I don’t need to tell you that your site should be mobile optimized.

That said:

Even sites that are super mobile-friendly can run into issues.

And unless users start emailing you complaints, these issues can be hard to spot.

That is, unless you use the Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report.
If Google finds that a page on your site isn’t optimized for mobile users, they’ll let you know.

Google will let you know if your site is not optimized

They even give you the specific things that are wrong with the page.

Google will give you specific things wrong with your page

That way, you know exactly what to fix.

Bonus Chapter:Technical SEO Case Studies

Technical SEO Case Studies

Let’s cap off this guide with a set of brand new technical SEO case studies.

Specifically, you’ll see how four Backlinko readers increased their Google rankings with:

  • Date Schema
  • Internal linking
  • FAQ Schema
  • Website migration best practices

So without further ado, let’s get right into the case studies.

Case Study #1
How Felix Used Internal Linking to Boost Organic Traffic By 250%


When Felix Norton audited one of his clients’ websites (an event hiring marketplace) for technical SEO issues, one thing stood out:

They weren’t using any internal links! And the internal links the site DID have didn’t use keyword-rich anchor text.

At this point, this client had been with Felix’s agency for 3 months. Felix and his team had been publishing A TON of high-quality content on their client’s blog. But traffic and rankings were stagnant.

Well, during that audit, Felix realized that none of this awesome content was linked together. Even worse: the content didn’t link to important product and services pages.

That’s when Felix decided to add internal links to their high-priority content pieces.

Felix – Internal links example

Product pages.

Felix – Product page example

And pieces of related content.

Felix – Related content example

Which resulted in a 250% traffic boost within a week of adding these strategic internal links.

Felix – Traffic boost chart

Case Study #2
How Salman Used Date Schema to Double His Page’s Google Traffic


Backlinko reader Salman Baig runs a tech review site called Voxel Reviews.

One of Salman’s most important keywords is “Best Gaming Laptops under 500”.

This might sound like a long tail keyword. Because it is.

But it’s a highly-specific keyword with high search intent. Which means that it was worth Salman’s time to find a way to increase the rankings for that term.

And when he looked at the SERPs for that keyword, he saw an opportunity. An opportunity that he could use technical SEO to tap into.

Specifically, he noticed that most of the pages on the first page had the current month and year in their title tag.

Salman Baig – "Best Gaming Laptops under 500" – SERP

However, many of these pages weren’t actually updating the page (or the “published” date in their HTML).

For example, this page adds the current month to its title tag like clockwork.

Ratingy – Current month in title tag

But if you search for that page’s URL with a date range…

Ratingy – Date range SERP

…you can see the actual date Google has saved for this article:

Ratingy – Date of post

That was the opportunity that Salman saw:

Adding the current month to his title tag may help his organic CTR. But Google clearly ignores it.

But if Google could see that Salman’s page was legit updated, he might get a rankings boost.

And to show Google that his page was actually up-to-date, he added the date to the top of his post.

Voxel reviews – Date at top of post

He also updated his Schema to update the “datePublished” and “dateModified” dates.

Voxel – Date published and modified

This change helped Salman’s site get picked up by a Featured Snippet.

Best gaming laptops – Featured Snippet

That Featured Snippet, plus a rankings boost for his target keyword, increased traffic to that page by more than 200%.

Best gaming laptops – Increased traffic

Case Study #3
How Neil Reversed a Disastrous Website Migration


Neil Sheth’s SEO agency, Only Way Online, took on a new client who’s rankings had completely tanked.

Only Way Online – Completely tanked

As it turned out, the site migrated their website to the latest version of Magento.

They also decided to combine this migration with a handful of changes to their website (like removing URLs that were getting search traffic) without considering the impact on organic search.

The site went from about 30,000 monthly visitors to as low as 3,000 visitors a month in a span of 2 months.

And when Neil did a full SEO site audit to figure out what went wrong, he found a host of technical SEO issues like:

  • Pages without internal links pointing to them (orphan pages)
  • Pages that were canonicalizing themselves to noindex pages
  • Pages redirecting to a page that is then redirected to another page (redirect chains)
  • Broken internal and external links
  • Sitemap including pages that should not be indexed
  • Poorly-optimized title and description tags

And you can start to see an uptick in organic traffic in the weeks following these technical SEO fixes.

Small uptick in organic traffic

In fact, from July 2019 to October the site has increased organic traffic by 228%.

Neil Sheth – Traffic increase

Case Study #4
How Bill Boosted His Clicks by 15.23% Using FAQ Schema


Bill Widmer runs a blog about RVs called The Wandering RV.

Bill Widmer – The Wandering RV

And one of Bill’s most important pages was this RV insurance guide:

The Wandering RV – Insurance guide

Unfortunately, keywords like “RV Insurance” are dominated by mega brands like Geico and Bankrate.com.

"RV Insurance" SERPs

So the chances of Bill’s one-man blog ranking above these sites was pretty slim.

That’s when Bill realized that he didn’t have to necessarily outrank his big brand competition. He could use FAQ Schema to get more organic clicks.

So Bill added FAQ Schema to the FAQ section of his page, which helped him get a rich snippet.

The Wandering RV – Featured Snippet

And that single change increased Google traffic to that page by 15.23%.

Google traffic increase by 15%

Now It’s Your Turn

Your Turn

That’s all for my guide to technical SEO.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What tip from this guide do you want to try out first?

Are you going to focus on speeding up your website?

Or maybe you want to find and fix dead links?

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment.

323 Comments

  1. I’m super grateful for this, Brian.

    I don’t know the process that you go through to pick out what your’re going to write about, but this, along with a few other recent posts have hit the nail on the head for me. And by this I mean that you’ve covered in-depth exactly some weak points of mind.

    Having all this practical info in one place and in an easy to follow guide is extremely valuable.

    Again, thanks so much!!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      No worries, Vlad. I choose topics based on a combination of keyword research, topic research, and topics that my readers have asked me to cover.

      For sure: having everything in one place is super valuable. That’s why I write so many of these definitive guides.

    1. Michael Avatar Michaelsays:

      I know your always have super crazy information. But was however disappointed that I couldn’t get a pdf download link

      1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

        It takes some time to turn these guides into PDFs.

  2. Brian,

    I must confess I’ve only skimmed so far but I’ll definitely be having a thorough read this weekend.

    I had a bit of a Youtube-marathon session with your videos the other night and have made a great deal of changes, for the better, to my website as a result.

    Thank you for publishing such fantastic content; keep it coming!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Allan. I think you’ll find this guide useful. I don’t cover a lot of technical SEO stuff in my videos. And the content here should fill in those gaps.

  3. Hi Brian,
    Kudos on another epic post. From this I’ll be turning on my breadcrumbs- I never liked they way they looked but realize now how important they are for SEO. Will all this downtime during quarantine, looks like I have time to make many changes you recommend! Thanks Brian,
    Hope you’re doing great!
    Jen

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Jen, happy to help. Breadcrumbs definitely makes sense for certain sites (or even sections of the same site). For example, the Backlinko blog doesn’t use breadcrumbs. But our “Hub” all do: https://backlinko.com/hub/seo. But yeah, definitely worth implementing when it makes sense. In my experience, it can make a small but significant difference in your rankings.

  4. This is perfect! Thank you so much. You have a talent of making difficult things understandable. This is just enough Technical SEO that most frelance writers need. With the other guides, this is some of the best SEO content online.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Peyton, you’re welcome. I have kind of an unfair advantage there because I’m not super technical. So I have to dumb things down out of necessity 😂

  5. This is great. I mostly wanted to read this to make sure I wasn’t missing anything major when I do the technical part for my clients. It doesn’t look like I’m missing anything.

    I might also send this article to my link building clients. I get a lot of people asking for guest posts but they haven’t done enough onsite yet.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Joshua, thank you. That’s good to hear. I mean: it never hurts to run a site through an SEO site audit tool. But even then, it helps to understand what the reports are telling you to do.

  6. Hi Brian,

    Again a massive guide. Also beautiful looking presentation.

    You and your team are really awesome.

    I recently applied the FAQ Schema to my SEO training (Kolkata) page and got the rich snippet as well.

    And, yes that helped me to get more clicks. Also, it looks attractive in SERP.

    I have a question:

    Do you provide any local SEO course?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Rintu. Happy to hear that. We offer a premium business training course called SEO That Works. It’s not local SEO focused but we do cover some local SEO material in the program.

  7. This is unbelievably valuable stuff Brian. Thanks for putting this together!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi David, you’re welcome. This guide definitely took a while. But I’m happy with how it turned out.

  8. Highly absorbing as usual! You are surely spending 100s of man hours just putting all this together.

    Big big fan from Goa, India.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Santosh. I don’t know about 100s but this one took some serious effort 👍

  9. I use mysite.org/post-name type structure. Should I switch to mysite.org/{category}/post-name to flatten the structure?

    Great article BTW, again.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Gaurav, not necessarily. If you run a blog, I’d stick to the structure you have now. It’s usually not worth changing everything just to flatten things a little bit.

  10. Matteo Gasparello Avatar Matteo Gasparellosays:

    Hey Brian, a great read as always!
    I personally recently switched from WordPress to Webflow and my website speed improved a lot. It’s too early to know if my rankings will improve because of it, but for now, I’m seeing a higher time spent on page (on some article pages)

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Matteo. Nice. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Webflow.

  11. Another mind-blowing SEO Article! Starting to implement these tips still from today! Thanks once again, Brian! You are a legend.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Vladimir, thanks. I appreciate that.

  12. Thank you again for that wonderful guide ! 🙏

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Valentin. This guide was a long time coming! Technical SEO was one of the few big topics in SEO (like link building and on-page SEO) that I hadn’t covered on the blog yet.

  13. Hii Brian,
    This a perfect guide for technical SEO to learn and implement to improve SEO ranking.
    Thanks

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      👍👍👍

  14. Aditya Kumar Avatar Aditya Kumarsays:

    Super helpful, the case study’s I love it
    Thanks brian

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Aditya

  15. Hey Brian

    Awesome post…keep up the great work !!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thank you 👍

  16. This is really cool! Thanks Brian!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome. Between the illustrations, screenshots and the writing itself, this guide was a ton of work. But I think it turned out to be one of our best ever.

  17. Guess what, I had tough time to search all of the above mentioned topics individually online. Now that I have this as a ready reckoner, I’ll look into this every now and then.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Nice 👍

  18. Viraj Waim Avatar Viraj Waimsays:

    Wow that the content is masterpiece ❤❤❤

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks!

  19. Brian, I think normal speed of website is important rather than the score of 90 because I think it will reduce the on page site time.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Ankit, What do you mean it will reduce on page site time?

      1. Salman Avatar Salmansays:

        Extremely helpful content and ideas for me. And Especially to all who are in SEO field.
        Thank you Sir 👍👏

  20. Hi Brian, excellent piece of content as usual. What would be the best method to update date schema? I just read the case study above. Would just updating the published date on WordPress help?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Surej, that’s right: if you update the published date on WordPress, that will change the “article:published_time” in your HTML. It’s actually a meta property and not schema, but it does the job.

  21. Thanks, Brian! Good job! I became your subscriber.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Nice!

  22. Hey Brian,
    this information is helpful even I know a bit but some of my doubts are clear here…
    Thanks for such a masterpiece

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      No problemo 👍👍👍

  23. Fantastic guide Brian! Can’t wait to digest the material. Thanks for all your efforts!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Darshana.

  24. Your SEO technical guide gives us a new perspective on the latest updated information. This culled from your years of work on the subject and I am pleased to have it. It is sometimes difficult to know what matters most and good to have you as a strong resource. Thank you.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Wanda, you’re welcome. I’m happy to hear that you’re already getting value from the guide.

  25. Lots of useful tips, thanks!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Mona, you’re welcome. Happy to help.

  26. Thanks for the Amazing Technical SEO Guide. I Asked for a Guide Regarding Hreflang for International SEO, You Replied that Its on the way…& Now Its in this Guide. Thank you

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome. That’s probably going to an an entry in the SEO Marketing Hub. But I do hope to cover international SEO someday soon.

  27. Hey Brian, This looks very technical guide and thank you for explaining this in very basic ways. I’ll try to implement some of these changes on my company website and see the impact.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Luca, sounds good. Let me know how it goes.

  28. Thanks a lot for putting this together!

    Technical SEO can be a struggle for people. I feel like I have a solid grasp on it but I can’t always implement the changes myself.

    Anyways, keep up the great work!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Arash, you’re welcome. For sure: technical SEO can be super confusing for non-techie people. But thanks to technical SEO tools (and guides like this), it will hopefully be a lot more accessible.

  29. Hey Brian,

    Definitely another in depth well structured guide, always appreciate you pumping these out.

    Curious as to whether you would recommend spending 1-3 months analyzing and implementing a deep technical audit post keyword research but before link building for a new client.

    Or like many of us with a stronger link building background, begin the link building outreach and get some links on the board right away for a new client in the first few months before taking a month (or more) off to conduct the technical audit and implementation.

    Obviously would be great (if client budget permits) to do both simultaneously and really clean things while sending some fresh link signals. But if you had to choose between one or the other how would you approach it in 2020?

    Keep crushing it as always!

    Paul

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Paul, thanks man! I appreciate that. I think site audits are a great first step for any client. That said: it doesn’t need to be a 1-3 month deep dive. Usually you can find 5-10 technical SEO quick wins that can make a difference right away. And fix those things in a week or so. Then, move onto link building, outreach, content etc.

  30. Hey Brian

    Being a beginner I was focusing on on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

    Technical SEO is something that very few people talk about.

    I will be bookmarking this post for future reference.

    Thanks a lot for sharing

    Amit Garg

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Amit.

  31. Sorin Avatar Sorinsays:

    Hi Brian,

    Amazing as always. Every time one of your emails hit my inbox I am all over it.

    One question, if I may tho.

    I’ve started a new blogs about guinea pigs and I wrote these articles like “Do guinea pigs eat Strawberries, Apples, Grapes, and so on.”
    Since they are very similar I use the same article structure at the top of the article where I let people know what the article will cover. About 50 words in the beginning where I only change, for example, Grapes with Apples.
    Does that count as duplicate content?
    Thank you,
    Sorin

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Sorin, thank you. I’d have to see the content to be sure. But that does sound like it’s probably duplicate content.

      1. Sorin Avatar Sorinsays:

        Can Guinea Pigs Eat Cherries, Cherry Pits, Cherry Tree Branches, Cherry Blossom, Dried Cherries, Canned Cherries, Frozen Cherries or Drink Cherry Juice?
        CHERRIES – Nutrition Facts [According to USDA National Nutrient Database]
        Feeding a Guinea Pig Cherries [Benefits & Possible Hazards]
        How OFTEN Can Guinea Pigs Eat CHERRIES?
        PREPARING Cherries For Your Guinea Pig [SIMPLE Process to Follow]
        Lots MORE…

        This is it 🙂

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          I think it’s OK to have a template like that. As long as the content is different, unique and not boilerplate, you’re good.

  32. After using noindex tag on duplicate content, does also need to use canonical tag on original content

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You don’t have to, no. As long as it’s not indexed, it’s not a problem in terms of SEO anymore.

  33. I used a google operator that is Site: MyWebisteURL & it gave me many pages that include WP Plugin Content etc. Though I have removed through the webmaster. How negatively it can impact on my SEO.

    How to avoid this in the future.
    Regards

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      I’d have to look to be sure. But you want to add a noindex tag to the page to make sure the page gets de-indexed over the long term.

  34. Awesome Article Brian, I have just de-indexed a few of my category pages which I thought were bringing in traffic but after checking were not really!
    So waiting for any changes in rankings for the posts underneath them!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Roger, nice! Usually you have to delete a good % of your pages for that to have a big impact on SEO. Either way, it’s always good to delete dead weight pages when you can.

  35. Very nice – even if you know a lot of this, going through it and seeing what you might be overlooking makes this a must read.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Ron. For sure: it never hurts to refresh your knowledge once and a while.

  36. Jaya Avatar Jayasays:

    Have you faced any major issues after changing the UI of your blog? If yes, then what it was.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      It was pretty smooth actually. No major issues.

  37. Danny Avatar Dannysays:

    Brian! Your content is so informative, subscribing to your emails is probably one of the best things I have done for my SEO. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge, it will take me a while to implement all of this but I know it’s going to help me out big time!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Danny, thanks man. Happy to help 👍

  38. Craig Avatar Craigsays:

    Massive respect Brian. Thank you!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Craig, you’re welcome 👍

      1. Manish Avatar Manishsays:

        Soo Helpfull.
        But small “how-to tech posts” less than 300 words are considered as thin content?

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          Not necessarily. If 300 words do the job, that’s perfectly fine.

  39. Brian, how a reader transition from technical SEO to SEO basics, I don’t see links to other SEO ultimate guides above

  40. Hi Brian,

    Your writing skill is so cool, how can I improve

  41. Alex Sanchez Avatar Alex Sanchezsays:

    Hey Brian,

    Just one thing to ask you, when will you lunch your own Search Engine? lol. 😉

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      HA! That’s a little too technical for me. I rather just learn about search engines and rank in them 🙂

  42. Mohammad Mostafa Kibria Avatar Mohammad Mostafa Kibriasays:

    Hello Brian Dean,
    I hope you doing well. I want to join your SEO Course In upcoming season. Please inform me, how can I enroll in your course?
    Thank you.

    Best Regard,
    Mohammad Mostafa Kibria

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Mohammad, we will likely open up enrollment SEO That Works in the summer. If you sign up here you’ll get a heads up as soon as we open: https://backlinko.com/seo-training

  43. Hi Brian,

    You have covered everything about Technical SEO.

    Technical SEO is the anatomy of SEO but few people know about it perfectly.

    Thanks!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Well said, Abuzar. It really is the foundation of SEO in many ways.

  44. Michael Avatar Michaelsays:

    Amazing fresh page layout and UX Brian. And then there’s the comprehensive content. How could Google NOT rank a page like this at number 1!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Michael. I’ve got my fingers crossed. “Technical SEO” is a pretty competitive keyword. So I really had to bring it for this guide.

  45. Amylee Avatar Amyleesays:

    I will be hosting an SEO webinar next week and I’m so happy I checked this out. I will be sharing this with my particpants. Saves me from having to try to explain this all myself!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Amylee, nice! That’s great timing.

  46. Hello Brian. How helpful are auditing tools like screamingfrog or sitebulb in fixing tech SEO issues? TIA.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Pawan, they’re super helpful. But most of the time you can get all you need from the site audit feature in Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush.

  47. Absolutely stunning article. I will skip dinner with my kids just to read this through. Awesome!!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      HA! Thanks Volker.

  48. Excellent! I’ll definitely be doing some of those optimisations. Thanks again.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Chris. Keep me posted on how the strategies work out for you.

  49. Super straightforward, helpful, actionable advice. Thanks

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Jeff, you’re welcome. Glad you enjoyed today’s guide.

  50. It’s interesting that one of my pages was copied (duplicated), but the copied one holds the higher position as they have more traffic than I do. What should I do?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Tomas, I’d ask them to take the post down or add a canonical tag to your page. Next time I’d use the Google Search Console to get your page indexed quickly.

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