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How to debug SEO issues on individual pages or on an entire site.
Easily recognizable
Google provides many tools to help you debug JavaScript SEO problems in Google Search. This guide gives you an overview of the available tools and tips on when to use each tool.
Find Basic SEO Problems With Lighthouse
Use Lighthouse for your first investigation. It comes with a ton of SEO audits.
Lighthouse SEO audits are very basic first checks for a single page of your website. They catch the most common mistakes and give you a first impression of how your website is doing in terms of search engine visibility. Note that Lighthouse runs in your browser, which is not an accurate representation of how Googlebot might view a web page. For example, browsers (and Lighthouse) don't use robots.txt
to decide if they can get resources from the network, while Googlebot does. So when Lighthouse identifies potential issues, you need to fix them, but you may have to use other tools to debug the issues further.
Validate pages with Google Search testing tools
Google Search provides
a set of tools to test how Googlebot views your web content.
Some of these tools are particularly useful when testing from your development environment:
In combination with
tools like local-tunnel or ngrok
You can create a temporary public URL from your local development environment and quickly iterate while testing with Google's testing tools.
These testing tools provide you with multiple pieces of useful information, such as:
- The rendered HTML that Googlebot will use for indexing.
- An overview of the loaded resources and explanations of why the resources cannot be loaded
- Console log messages and JavaScript errors with stack traces
The Google Search Console URL inspection tool It can also give you detailed information about the status of a page.
Here you can find out:
- Whether the URL is in Google's search index or can be indexed in the future
- What the most recent crawl rendered HTML looks like
- What Rendered HTML Looks Like for New Page Crawling
- Information on page resources
- JavaScript log messages and errors with stack traces
- A screenshot
- Mobile usability issues
- What structured data was detected on the page and if it is valid
With these tools you can identify most problems and solve them. Google Search also provides documentation for
troubleshoot JavaScript issues related to Google search
for further guidance on what to do once you have identified the cause of a problem.
Investigate site status with Google Search Console
The tools in the last section are great for solving specific problems on a single page of your website, but if you want a better overview of your entire website, the Google search console is where you should go.
Coverage report
the Coverage report It shows you which pages on your website are indexed and which ones have problems.
Core Web Vitals Report
the Core Web Vitals Report helps you get an overview of your website page performance in terms of Core Web Vitals.
In this article, we have looked at a number of tools for various purposes, from testing a page before publishing it to monitoring the pages on a live website that give you transparency on how your website performs in terms of visibility for Google Search. . Some of these tools can become useful parts of your development toolkit, others can be more like ad-hoc tools to identify the cause of a problem and correct the affected pages. For more information on Google Search for developers or JavaScript SEO, take a look at the official
Find developers documentation.