Ahrefs is an SEO tool that identifies issues on your websites, like broken links, missing alt-text, and more. When I first ran the tool, my site got a 44/100 ðŸ˜
Top Issues#
Here's a screenshot of the problems Ahrefs encountered on blogthedata.com
Alt-text, H1 tags, meta descriptions/titles#
These were pretty straightforward fixes. Images should have alt-text for non-sighted users, and every page should have an H1 tag as the main header.
Meta descriptions and titles are meta tags in <head> are used for social media previews and search engines. I needed to finesse mine to ensure they were in the Goldilocks zone, not too long or too short!
Duplicate Pages Without Canonical#
Search engine crawlers treat the same URLs as duplicates if your site supports 'www' and no 'www' (known as the 'apex' domain). For example,
https://www.blogthedata.comÂ
and
https://blogthedata.comÂ
Technically, both of those are on separate domains, so I was getting flagged for duplicate content. To resolve this issue, I found this article by Cloudflare, which walks you through how you can set up bulk redirects, so anyone visiting a 'www' URL gets redirected to one without www (I think it looks cleaner, anyway!)
After implementing bulk redirects, my score skyrocketed to 92/100.
Removing the remaining duplicate pages#
I wasn't entirely done. I still had 27 pages that were flagged as duplicates. The issue was that the way I was doing pagination resulted in duplicate content. For example,
https://blogthedata.com/productivity?page1
Had a lot of the same headings, meta tags, and text as:
https://blogthedata.com/productivity?page2
I found a few solutions, but I didn't like them. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to implement infinite scrolling with htmx so I could do away with pagination. You can reach more about that implementation in the linked post above, but the result was that my duplicate pages went down to ZERO!
Conclusion#
Ahrefs is an excellent tool in your SEO toolbox. I resolved hundreds of errors that improved my site's SEO, accessibility, and performance. Take your site for a spin through Ahrefs and improve your website health!
