Architecture

A well-structured URL is short, descriptive, and uses hyphens to separate words. Best practices:

• Keep URLs under 115 characters

• Limit depth to 3–4 path segments (e.g., /category/subcategory/page)

• Avoid query parameters, uppercase letters, underscores, and long numeric IDs

• Use descriptive slugs containing keywords

Deep or messy URLs signal poor site architecture and can reduce crawl efficiency. URL structure issues are warnings.

Breadcrumbs show the user's position in the site hierarchy (Home > Category > Page). They help both users and search engines understand site structure.

The audit checks for breadcrumbs in HTML (nav elements with 'breadcrumb' class or aria-label) and in JSON-LD (BreadcrumbList schema). Missing breadcrumbs are flagged as an info-level issue (−2 pts).

HTTP response headers affect caching, security, and SEO. The audit evaluates:

Caching:

• Cache-Control — controls browser and CDN caching. Missing or containing no-cache/no-store triggers a warning.

• ETag, Expires, Age — additional caching headers (reported, not individually flagged)

Compression:

• Content-Encoding — gzip or brotli compression reduces transfer size. Missing compression is flagged.

Security headers (7 checked, score = present/7 × 100):

• Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) — forces HTTPS. Missing = warning.

• X-Content-Type-Options — prevents MIME-type sniffing

• X-Frame-Options — prevents clickjacking

• X-XSS-Protection — browser XSS filter

• Content-Security-Policy — prevents XSS and injection

• Referrer-Policy — controls referrer information

• Permissions-Policy — controls browser feature access

Server info:

• Server / X-Powered-By headers — leaking server info is flagged

• Content-Type — flagged if charset is missing

Severity: HSTS and Cache-Control issues are warnings (−10 pts). All other header issues are info (−2 pts).

Anchor text diversity measures how varied the clickable text of internal links is. Low diversity (many links with the same text) suggests poor internal linking.

The audit analyses all internal links and flags:

• Empty anchors (links with no visible text or image)

• Generic anchors ('click here', 'read more') that provide no context

• Low diversity ratio (< 50% unique anchors when > 10 links exist)

Anchor diversity issues are warnings.