How to Fix Common Crawl Issues# Link to this article

Most audits surface the same small set of problems. Fixing these clears the majority of findings.

Blocked by robots.txt# Link to this section

A page you want indexed is disallowed. Check whether the rule is intentional. Disallowing a URL does not remove it from Google — it only stops Google reading it, which can leave a stale result in place. Use noindex on the page for removal, and reserve robots.txt for pages you never want fetched.

Unintended noindex# Link to this section

Usually a staging setting that shipped to production, or a template applying noindex to a paginated series. Confirm on the live URL, not in your CMS preview.

Redirect chains and loops# Link to this section

Point the first URL directly at the final destination. Chains waste crawl budget and lose a little link value at each hop; loops make the page unreachable entirely.

Broken internal links (4xx)# Link to this section

Fix the link, not the destination — adding a redirect for every typo accumulates into a chain problem later. Rankato lists the source page for each broken link so you can edit it directly.

Duplicate or missing titles and meta descriptions# Link to this section

Almost always a template that omits a variable. Fix the template once rather than editing pages individually.

Missing or conflicting canonicals# Link to this section

Each page should declare one self-referencing canonical unless it is genuinely a duplicate. Conflicting signals — a canonical pointing one way and an hreflang or sitemap entry pointing another — leave Google to guess.

Slow or heavy pages# Link to this section

Rankato reports lab performance metrics per page. Start with the largest render-blocking resource and unoptimised images; they account for most of the gap on most sites.

After deploying fixes, re-run the audit. Comparing two runs with the same page limit shows exactly what your change resolved.