3 Pillars of Technical SEO

SEO Gurus and agencies have started making business-owners threatened about various complicated terms of Tech SEO. Don’t get fooled by too many things! Google, in one of their recently published video, suggested 3 main pillars for everyone to consider while developing any website or, auditing any website. In this article, let us discuss what are the 3 pillars of Technical SEO and what exactly you should do in Tech-SEO.

The purpose of a technical SEO diagnosis/audit is to check the website backend thoroughly for the indexing and ranking blockages and get a solution to remove those blockers. And according to Google, you do not even need a paid tool to check these 3 index-blocking issues. Webmasters can check this directly from the Search console.

So, what are the three pillars of technical SEO? According to Google’s latest video, they are –

• Checking whether a webpage is indexable, indexed, or allowed to index.
• Checking the rendered HTML code for related issues.
• Checking whether the webpage is duplicate.

And the fun part is, every webmasters can get these information from Search console itself. Let’s deep dive and discuss about these important 3 metrics of Tech-SEO.

Checking whether a webpage is indexable, indexed, or allowed to index

Many SEOs and website owners ignore this issue, but it is much more important thing to look into rather than some complicated metrics.The easiest way to find these URLs is by inspecting in the Google search console. This is a great tool that will show you whether the page is indexed or indexable. And, if not, why the page can not be indexed to Google.

In a different article, I have already wrote about what Indexing is to Google, you can read that post to have a clear idea of indexing.

In the GSC inspection tool, it will show you why Google is not able to index your webpage properly. It will also show the last crawl date of that particular page which will give you an understanding of Google Trends of your topic.

If that particular page is a static page and does not change frequently, then you can ignore last crawl date too! Because often Google follow this to reduce their server load.

Checking the rendered HTML code for related issues

This is the most important and super helpful thing to check. In some of the documentation and videos, Google declared that what you see in code by clicking the ‘View Page Source’ is not the same what Google see in your ‘Rendered HTML’.

In simple words, Rendered HTML is the code that is generated for Googlebot to check the webpage. During an SEO audit, it is essential to check the rendered HTML code to get to know what Googlebot is seeing of that webpage while crawling. You often heard about ‘JavaScript Rendering’, any issue related to this can be viewed in the rendered HTML code.

Google Posted:

“…check the rendered HTML and the HTTP response to see if there’s something you won’t expect.

For example, a stray error message or content missing due to some technical issues on your server or in your application code.”

– Google Blog

Check How To Check Rendered HTML.

Checking whether the webpage is duplicate

You can not let Google index the several variant of the same page. There is a term that SEOs use is ‘Crawl Budget’. The website structure should be in a such a way that it defines what to crawl, what not to crawl.
If a single webpage has several versions, the all the versions will be tagged as a ‘Duplicate Page’ and an other web page is canonical. This is a critical SEO error.

In the above video, Google declared that a webmaster can define a different version as ‘Canonical’ and that is absolutely fine. In fact, a webpage must have a canonical URL declared. All the ‘hreflang’ attributed pages must have a declared canonical i.e, the main page of your primary language.