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Search engine optimization has evolved far beyond simply adding keywords. Today, the difference between a ranking site and one lost in the void often comes down to technical SEO, the framework that helps search engines crawl, read, and serve your content.
The problem? Many technical SEO checks are forgotten until they cause damage. Some are small details lost in busy teams, while others only appear once rankings and traffic drop. This article covers the most commonly overlooked technical SEO checks, why they matter, and how to fix them.
Commonly Overlooked Technical SEO Checks
Small technical SEO issues can quietly hurt your site’s performance. Here are the most commonly overlooked checks to watch:
1. Hreflang Tags That Don’t Match Reality
For multilingual or multinational websites, hreflang tags are a blessing. They tell search engines which page version to show users based on language and location. But they are also one of the easiest SEO details to misconfigure.
Common mistakes are:
- Wanting to reference the wrong URL, perhaps a spelling mistake or dead link.
- Forgotten self-referencing hreflang, as every page must reference itself as well.
- Confusing country and language codes, e.g., “en-UK” instead of “en-GB.”
- Absent return tags, because if Page A references Page B, then Page B needs to reference Page A.
Bad hreflang tags can display the wrong page version to users, increasing bounce rates and missed conversions. Search engines may even ignore your hreflang setup entirely.
Pro tip: Crawl your site with tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to check hreflang validity, and review Google Search Console’s International Targeting report for errors.
2. XML Sitemaps Behind Times
An XML sitemap is a search engine map that informs crawlers where the most important pages are. However, most businesses forget to update the sitemap when the site structure gets modified.
Some of the traps that are often found are:
- Old URLs which still appear even though the pages were removed or redirected.
- Lost new pages, i.e., search engines take longer to locate them.
- Disjoint sitemaps not interconnected in an index file. Bigger sites also commonly fail to submit a sitemap index, making it harder for search engines to find them all.
Even if your site is internally extremely well-linked, an outdated sitemap reduces crawling efficiency. That decelerates the indexing of essential updates.
Pro tip: Automate sitemap generation with your CMS or server-side scripts to keep it up to date, and resubmit it to Google Search Console after major changes.
3. Duplicate Meta Tags
Duplicate meta titles and descriptions may not sound catastrophic, but they can actually severely harm your site’s presence in search results.
The most common reasons are:
- Auto-generated CMS defaults that replicate meta tags across many pages.
- Faceted navigation that creates limitless variations of URLs, which take the same tags.
- Copying template tags by developers for convenience, leading to duplicated tags.
Duplicate meta tags dilute relevance, confuse search engines, and reduce click-through – imagine two highly similar search snippets competing for users; neither wins.
Pro tip: Run a site scan with tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover duplicate tags. Generate unique titles and descriptions dynamically where possible, based on product names or categories.
4. Wastage of Crawl Budget
Search engines have a limited crawl budget per site. If your site is wasting this budget on low-priority or irrelevant pages, priority pages may be skipped or crawled less frequently.
Crawl budget issues typically stem from:
- Parameterized URLs such as session IDs, tracking parameters, or filter combinations.
- Infinite loops, especially on ecommerce sites with layered navigation.
- Thin content of low value that contributes nothing of substance to users or search engines.
The danger is simple: search engines may not crawl fresh content quickly enough, delaying its visibility. Crawl inefficiency can also reduce the freshness of your pages over time.
Pro tip: Use robots.txt and canonical tags to favor crawl budgets for high-value URLs. Monitor the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console to find areas of inefficiency.
5. Regional Visibility Blind Spots
Your site may be accessible in some countries but hidden or restricted in others, often due to server settings, geotargeting, or misconfigured hreflang tags. This can limit how users and search engines in different regions access your content.
Regional visibility problems typically stem from:
- Pages appearing fine in one country but not in another due to server restrictions.
- Misconfigured hreflang tags causing search engines to serve the wrong regional page.
- Lack of testing from multiple locations, leaving regional issues unnoticed.
Without checking, you could miss entire markets, losing potential traffic, leads, and revenue in regions where your site might otherwise perform well.
Pro tip: Check results from multiple locations using a VPN, which lets you browse from other countries, and combine this with localized keyword analysis to confirm visibility.
6. Orphan Pages That Nobody Can Find
An orphan page is present but has no internal links pointing to it. Search engines rely on internal linking to discover new content, so orphan pages are often unseen except when included in the sitemap.
Orphan pages may arise when:
- A new page goes live but never gets linked through menus or related content.
- Older material gets de-linked when a site redesign takes place but is left on the server.
- Campaign landing pages are constructed and left when the promotion is over.
If these are technically available but link-less, it tells search engines that they’re low priority. That reduces their ability to rank.
Pro tip: Crawl your site and compare it to your sitemap and analytics. Pages that are getting traffic but have no internal incoming links should be a priority to reinstate.
7. Incorrect Canonical Tags
Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a page is the “main” one. Used effectively, they prevent duplicate content problems. Used ineffectively, they’ll destroy parts of your site.
Some of the most common errors are:
- T Canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL.
- No self-canonicals, leaving it open for grabs what page is optimal.
- Mixing HTTP and HTTPS in canonical URLs after a site move.
A canonical tag that is incorrect will lead search engines to exclude the correct page altogether, and thus delete it from search results.
Pro tip: Always check for canonical tags following migrations, redesigns, and CMS upgrades. Use a crawler to ensure that canonicals are accurate and deliberate.
8. Robots.txt Rules That Go Too Far
The robots.txt file is critical for directing search engines away from low-value sections, but a single misplaced line can cause your most important content to be deindexed.
Examples include:
- Accidentally blocking the whole site in development and remembering to remove the rule only after deployment.
- Blocking necessary JavaScript or CSS files, which causes Google to fail to render the page properly.
- Too general, disallow directives that limit useful content.
Search engines comply with robots.txt very strictly. That makes mistakes here particularly harmful.
Pro tip: Test your robots.txt using Google Search Console’s robots test tool. Make sure it blocks everything you want but remains crawlable by all necessary assets.
9. Mixed HTTP and HTTPS Signals
After a move to HTTPS, the site is usually left with legacy HTTP URLs. They tend to confuse search engines and users.
Problems are:
- Accept inconsistent redirects where some pages still resolve on HTTP.
- Internal links pointing to HTTP instead of HTTPS.
- Duplicate copies of content reachable via both protocols.
Inconsistent security signals decrease confidence and divide ranking signals between copies.
Pro tip: Set up sitewide 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. Crawl to verify all internal links refer to HTTPS only.
10. Broken Structured Data
Structured data markup can add rich snippets to your search listings. Unfortunately, it tends to silently break with site changes.
Examples are:
- Product schema lacking price or availability details.
- Review markup that no longer matches visible content.
- Breadcrumb schema pointing to non-existent URLs.
Damaged structured data not only renders rich result eligibility impossible but can also trigger manual penalties if misleading.
Pro tip: Verify your structured data on a regular basis in Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Automate reviews where possible.
11. Third-Party Slow Rendering
Page speed is a ranking signal. While the overwhelming majority of teams optimize code and images, they will not check the size of third-party scripts.
Examples include:
- Marketing trackers that add hundreds of milliseconds of load time.
- Chat widgets that hold rendering until they are initialized.
- Ad networks that inject variable delays.
All these features harm both SEO and user experience.
Pro tip: Test your site’s performance using Lighthouse or WebPageTest. Find slow third-party scripts and replace or defer them when possible.
12. Pagination Gone Wrong
Big sites frequently use pagination to structure long lists of products or articles. Pagination, when done improperly, can mislead search engines.
Errors are:
- Missing rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags.
- Pages not indexed because of noindex tags.
- Canonicals pointing to the very first page only, which means that the deeper pages are ignored.
This causes poor indexing coverage and reduced visibility for products or articles placed deeply in paginated sets.
Pro tip: Use consistent pagination markup – make paginated pages crawlable and provide unique value.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO may not make headlines, but it can be the difference between strong rankings and lost content.
Overlooked checks like hreflang tags, sitemaps, duplicate metas, crawl budget, orphan pages, misconfigured canonicals, and broken structured data can cause major issues if ignored.
Most are preventable with regular audits and monitoring, so addressing them now protects your visibility, traffic, and workflow.
