Hello DEV, this is our first post here. We are RankSoftTech, a small team working on SEO, WordPress development, and App Store Optimization. We joined this community to share the practical side of SEO, the checks and fixes that actually move a website, without the fluff. So let us start with the topic that quietly decides whether all your other SEO work even gets a chance.
You can publish excellent content, earn good backlinks, and do everything right on the surface, while one blocked setting or one broken file underneath holds your whole site back. Technical SEO issues are exactly that kind of problem. They rarely show an error on your screen. Your pages keep loading, your design keeps looking fine, and yet Google struggles to crawl your site, index your pages, or trust what it finds.
Here are the 12 technical SEO issues we check first on any site, what each one does, and how to fix it.
1. Pages Not Getting Indexed
Publishing a page does not guarantee Google will index it, and a page that is not indexed can never rank. Open Google Search Console, go to the Pages report under Indexing, and read the reasons under "Why pages aren't indexed", especially "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed".
The fix: Give every important page a clear path from your homepage through internal links, include it in your XML sitemap, remove or improve thin pages that waste crawl attention, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing after you improve the page.
2. Duplicate Content and Keyword Cannibalization
These two get confused all the time. Duplicate content means the same text appears in more than one place. Cannibalization is worse: two or more of your own pages compete for the same search intent, so Google cannot decide which one to rank, and both end up weaker. In Search Console, open the Performance report, click a query, then open the Pages tab. If two of your URLs get impressions for the same query, they are competing.
The fix: Pick the stronger page as the owner of the topic, merge the useful content from the weaker page into it, redirect the old URL to it with a 301, and update your internal links to point to the final page.
3. Broken Links and 404 Errors
One or two broken links will not hurt you, but as a site grows and pages get moved, renamed, or deleted, they quietly pile up. They waste crawl budget and send visitors to a dead end. Search Console lists them under "Not found (404)" in the Pages report, and a crawl with Screaming Frog finds the internal links pointing to them.
The fix: Update links to the new URL where the page moved, redirect to a similar page where one exists, and leave a genuine 404 when a page was removed on purpose and nothing similar exists. That last part is honest and correct.
4. Redirect Chains and Loops
A chain is URL A redirecting to B, which redirects to C, instead of going straight to the final page. A loop is worse, because the redirects circle back and the page never loads. Every extra hop slows things down and makes Google less likely to reach the end.
The fix: List every redirect that points to another redirect, point each old URL directly to the final live URL, and update internal links so they use the final URL instead of a redirect.
5. Slow Speed and Poor Core Web Vitals
Speeding up a website is not just compressing images. Google measures Core Web Vitals: LCP, how fast the main content loads; INP, how quickly the page responds when a visitor interacts with it; and CLS, how stable the layout is while loading. A page can have small images and still fail all three. Check the field data in PageSpeed Insights, and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
The fix: Fix INP first if it is failing, because heavy JavaScript is usually the cause. Then reduce server response time, compress and correctly size images, and remove plugins and scripts the page does not actually need. Retest after each round of changes.
6. Mobile Usability Issues
Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of your site first. A page that looks perfect on your laptop but is cramped or hard to tap on a phone is the version Google is really judging. Test your own pages on your phone: read the text without zooming, tap the buttons, fill in the form.
The fix: Make body text readable without zooming, give buttons and links enough space for a thumb, remove anything that causes sideways scrolling, and check popups, because one that covers the whole mobile screen frustrates visitors and Google alike.
7. Missing or Broken XML Sitemap
Your sitemap is the map you hand to Google. If it is missing, outdated, or full of pages that no longer exist, Google wastes time on dead URLs and discovers your new pages much later. Visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and look at what it actually contains, then check the Sitemaps section in Search Console for errors.
The fix: Keep only live, working URLs in the sitemap, with no redirects, no 404s, and no noindex pages. Make sure your important pages are included, then resubmit the cleaned sitemap in Search Console.
8. Accidental Noindex and robots.txt Blocking
This is the quietest and most dangerous issue on this list. A noindex tag tells Google to keep a page out of search results completely, and a blocking line in robots.txt stops Google from crawling it. Both have legitimate uses during development, but if one gets left on a live page by mistake, that page simply disappears from Google while everything looks normal on your end. Search Console shows these under "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" and "Blocked by robots.txt" in the Pages report.
The fix: Remove noindex from any page that should rank, check your SEO plugin settings, and in WordPress also check the Reading settings, because one sitewide option there can discourage search engines from indexing the whole site. After fixing, request indexing through URL Inspection.
9. Orphan Pages and Weak Internal Linking
An orphan page is a page that no other page on your site links to. Google finds pages mainly by following links, and it judges importance partly by how many of your own pages point to a page. So a strong page with zero internal links sends a clear signal that it does not matter much. Crawl your site and sort pages by the number of internal links pointing to them.
The fix: Link every important page from at least two or three relevant pages, use descriptive anchor text instead of "click here", and when you publish a new post, add links to it from older related articles on the same day.
10. HTTPS and Mixed Content Issues
If your site runs on HTTPS but some images, scripts, or files still load over HTTP, browsers call it mixed content. Visitors may see a "not secure" warning, and browsers can block the insecure parts entirely, which breaks layouts and destroys trust before a visitor reads a single word.
The fix: Update internal links, images, and file references to their HTTPS versions, redirect every HTTP page to its HTTPS version in a single hop, and check old posts carefully, because images added years ago often keep their original HTTP addresses.
11. Duplicate or Missing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Every page needs its own title that matches what the page is actually about. When several pages share one title, or a title describes a topic the page no longer covers, Google has to guess, and searchers skip you even when you rank.
This one is personal for us. Our own technical SEO article was getting hundreds of impressions for the search "technical seo issues" and almost no clicks, because the title did not match what searchers expected from that query. The page did not have a traffic problem. It had a title and intent problem, and fixing that changed everything for the article.
The fix: Write a unique title for every important page with its main keyword near the start, match it to the real intent behind the queries the page receives in Search Console, and write a meta description that gives a clear reason to click. Do not change the page URL just to match a new title. Changing a title is safe, changing a URL is a separate decision.
12. Structured Data Errors
Structured data, or schema markup, is how you state facts about your page in a language Google understands directly. When it is missing where it should exist, or contains errors, or describes things that are not really on the page, you lose rich result opportunities. Search Console lists these problems in its enhancement reports, and the Rich Results Test shows exactly what Google can read on a single page.
The fix: Add structured data only for content that genuinely exists on the page, fix the specific errors Search Console reports one type at a time, and validate each fixed page in the Rich Results Test before asking Google to recrawl it.
A Quick Monthly Check
You do not need paid tools to catch most of this. Once a month or so: read the Pages report in Search Console, test your most important URLs with URL Inspection, open your sitemap, run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and one key article, and crawl the site with a free tool like Screaming Frog. Write down what you find before you fix anything, so you can later prove which fix actually worked.
Technical SEO rarely breaks all at once. It erodes quietly, and it improves the same way, one root cause fixed at a time.
We published a longer version of this guide on our blog, with detailed steps for every fix: 12 Common Technical SEO Issues (and How to Fix Each One)
Now we are curious: which of these have you found hiding on your own site? In our experience, numbers 8 and 11 surprise people the most.
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