SEO checks: redirects, hreflang and result snippets

What is here

Redirect tracing How an address is followed from the first request to the final destination, hop by hop, and why some hops never appear in a server response. Written up in full under redirect tracing.

A check is deliberately narrow, and the narrowness is the method. One that audited a page as a whole would produce a list nobody acts on, whereas a check that answers a single question gives you something you can do next. That is why every page in this section stays on one question, and why each states what it does not report as plainly as what it does.

Narrow also means repeatable. A check worth trusting reads the same things in the same order every time, so that two runs of it disagree only when the site changed between them. The write-ups here describe checks in exactly those terms: what is requested, what is read from the answer, and at which step a difference means a fault rather than a preference. Reading a check this way is slower than pasting an address into a form, and it pays back the first time a result needs to be defended to somebody else: you can say what was measured, not only what a page of results asserted.

What these checks deliberately do not cover

Each check answers its own question and stops there.

None of them reads canonical declarations, crawler directives, or the tags used when a link is shared, even though a page being checked carries all of those. Those subjects belong to other sites in this network, and a check that reported on everything it happened to see would be answering questions this site has not earned the right to answer.

The explanations live in the sections on redirects and hreflang, and each check links back to the part of them it belongs with.

FAQ