Goal
Knowing which of your site’s pages need to be indexed, deindexed, redirected or canonicalized, as well as knowing how to perform each of these actions
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SOP-027
How to perform a URL audit on your site
Increase your search engine rankings by knowing which of your pages need to be indexed, deindexed, redirected or canonicalized, as well as how to perform each of these actions
Type
SOPs · PDF
Last updated
18 July 2024
Who does this
You, your SEO specialist, a VA you hired, or a digital marketing agency you employed
Length
12 pages
Comes with
From Leads to Sales: Funnel Building 101
Ideal outcome
You will clean up your website’s URL profile, by only indexing the pages that need to be indexed and solving some duplicate content issues
Why it matters
This URL audit is very important for crawl-path optimization. In other words, indexing the right URLs on your website will help Google and the other search engines crawl the pages you want them to display in SERPs, as opposed to pages that only make your website look outdated, spammy, or plain and simply low-quality
Before you start
• The following procedure applies solely to WordPress websites that are entirely set up (including with the Yoast SEO plugin installed). If your WordPress site is not fully set up yet, you can see how to do it in SOP 008 (web version). • Furthermore, keep in mind that this procedure only applies to small-to-medium sized websites (usually, up to a few hundred URLs). The URL audit process for large sites is out of the scope of this SOP
Key steps 40 steps
What is inside 47 headings
1 Find all URLs on your website 10
- Go to your Wordpress Admin Panel → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
- Upload the plugin from your computer.
- Click on “Install Now”.
- Click on “Activate”.
- Go to Tools → Export All URLs.
- Tick “All Types”, “URLs”, and “CSV”.
- Click on “Export”.
- Click on “Download Now”.
- Select where to download the .csv file.
- Rename it (for the purpose of this example, we used “Exported_Data_All_URLs”, but you can rename it any other way that makes it easy to recognize).
2 Classify the URLs 11
- Open a new sheet in Google Sheets.
- Go to File → Open → Open your .csv file with all the URLs.
- Copy the URLs.
- Go to the “Template 011: URL Audit Worksheet (web version)” we have created for you.
- Make a copy of it in your own Drive folders.
- Add a new sheet. Rename it “Unclassified URLs”.
- Paste the URLs from the .csv files in the “Unclassified URLs” list.
- Take each URL in the “Unclassified URLs” sheet, then copy and paste it into the appropriate column in the “Classified URLs” sheet, according to the following questions and instructions.
- Should the content of this page be found in search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc)?
- Is the content of the page an exact copy or very similar (50% of the text is the same) to another page in your site?
- Is the content of this page the ORIGINAL or CANONICAL content from which other copies were created?
3 Take action on each of the categories created 23
- Install and activate the Redirection wordpress plugin (the plugin installation process is similar to that described for the “Export All URLs” plugin).
- Go to Tools > Redirection.
- Input the source URL (the one in your “Redirect column) and target URL (the one where you want users to be redirected to if they stumble upon the outdated URL.)
- Add redirect.
- Mark the URL as completed in the worksheet.
- Go to the page or post editor for that URL.
- Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section.
- Click on “Advanced.”
- Under “Meta robots index”, select “noindex.”
- Publish the changes.
- Mark the URL as completed in the worksheet.
- Go to the page or post editor for that URL.
- Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section.
- Click on “Advanced.”
- Under “Meta robots index”, select “index”
- Publish the changes.
- Mark the URL as completed in the worksheet.
- Go to the page or post editor.
- Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section.
- Click on “Advanced.”
- Under “Canonical URL”, input the URL of the page that has the original or canonical content.
- Publish the changes.
- Mark the URL as completed in the worksheet.
The document 12 pages
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