For my college course I built SiteScope (vikramyadav.me), a free technical SEO audit tool. You enter a site, it crawls up to 300 pages, and it tells you what to fix first. No sign-up.
The problem
Two things bugged me about free SEO checkers.
First, many test a single URL and hand back an unordered list. SiteScope follows internal links and the XML sitemap and checks every page it finds (up to 300 per audit). Then it ranks issues with one rule:
priority = severity × share of pages affected
A missing alt text on every page outranks a broken link on one page; a 5xx on half the site outranks both.
Second, a lot of sites load their content with JavaScript. SiteScope reads raw HTML, the way the major AI crawlers do, so you can check whether your content needs JavaScript to show up. The tool itself uses no JavaScript framework. Every page, including the report, is server-rendered, because a tool that talks about JavaScript SEO should be readable by a crawler that runs none.
It also checks broken links, duplicate and near-duplicate pages (SimHash), the internal link graph (click depth, PageRank, orphan pages), titles, meta descriptions, H1s, canonicals, noindex and more.
Tech stack
- FastAPI (Python 3.12) with Jinja2 templates; audits run as FastAPI background tasks
- PostgreSQL 16, where each finished result is one JSONB column
- Docker Compose with an Nginx reverse proxy and Certbot
- Azure VM: one small VM (2 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM) running two containers
- Cloudflare for DNS and proxying
- httpx + asyncio for crawling, BeautifulSoup for parsing, NetworkX for the link graph
What I learned
- A URL fetcher is an SSRF hole. If a stranger can type any URL, they will try the cloud metadata service or localhost. The guard refuses private, loopback and reserved addresses, and it checks every redirect hop, not just the first request.
- Keep dependencies small on a small VM. NetworkX's PageRank pulled in numpy and scipy, so I wrote my own PageRank and tested it against the reference.
- Severity alone gets the order wrong. Multiplying by the share of pages affected fixed it.
- DNS moves need care. Switching nameservers to Cloudflare replaces the whole zone, so I recreated the existing records first and issued SSL before turning on the proxy.
What's next
Some things are still open: a DNS-rebinding gap in the SSRF guard, and no PDF export or saved audits yet.
Try it at vikramyadav.me and see the code on GitHub. Feedback welcome!
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