SEO audit for blogs: archives, duplication and posts that go stale
Most blogs don't have a content problem. They have an archive problem.
A blog with a few hundred posts usually has a few thousand URLs, because every tag, category, author and date archive is a page. Most of them list the same excerpts, none of them rank, and together they take up most of the crawl.
This is what an audit of a content site looks for — starting with the automatically generated pages, because that is where almost all of the waste is.
What goes wrong on Blog sites
Tag archives that exist for one post
Tags applied once create a page with one excerpt on it. Fifty tags used twice is a hundred near-empty pages competing with the posts they point at. Either curate tags deliberately or noindex the archives.
Pagination handled badly
Canonicalising /page/3/ to the blog index hides everything past the first screen, so older posts become unreachable by crawl. Paginated pages should be self-canonical and properly linked.
Excerpts duplicated across archives
The same paragraph appears on the blog index, the category, the tag and the author page. It isn't penalised, but it is a lot of pages saying nothing new, and it is why archives rarely rank.
Posts with no internal links pointing at them
Once a post falls off the front page it is often reachable only through pagination. Orphaned posts get crawled less and decay quietly, which is the most common cause of "my old content stopped ranking".
Old posts that are still ranking and no longer true
A 2021 guide holding position four is an asset with a maintenance cost. The audit shows which posts get traffic and haven't changed in years — the highest-return editing list you will get.
Author and date archives nobody needs
A single-author blog does not need author archives, and date archives are useful to almost nobody. Both are indexable by default on most platforms.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- Every auto-generated archive, and which are indexable
- Pagination and canonical handling across archive templates
- Posts with no inbound internal links
- Duplicate titles and descriptions across archives and posts
- Thin posts, and posts that have not been updated in years
- Core Web Vitals on a post page, where ads and embeds usually live
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
Meta tag checker
Every tag in the head of your page, read back to you the way a crawler sees it.
Broken link checker
Every link on the page, followed, with the status code it returns.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Orphan page
No other page on the site links to it.
Duplicate title tags
Several pages share one identical title.
Duplicate meta descriptions
The same summary text is reused across pages.
Questions
Related
WordPress
The problems WordPress creates for itself, and the ten minutes it takes to find them.
SaaS
On a SaaS site the traffic is not the problem. Which pages get it is.
Squarespace
A tidy platform with a few defaults worth turning off.
Crawl the blog and see how many of those URLs are archives nobody reads
The free audit crawls the site, groups every finding, and returns the five things worth fixing this month in plain English. No card, no call.
Run a free audit