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Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes: How Severe Are They? by Anna Lebedeva #399

Ep. 39926 min2017-12-11

Anna Lebedeva's SEMrush study of 100,000 websites and 450,000,000 pages identifies broken internal links, 4XX errors, and misconfigured www domains as the most damaging and common technical SEO mistakes.

Cover art for Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes: How Severe Are They? by Anna Lebedeva #399
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Key takeaways
if they type www and it doesn't work for them, you are, I'm going to quote Mr. Wonderful, you are dead to them.

About this episode

Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes: How Severe Are They?Discover the most common technical SEO mistakes that hurt many websites' rankings and overall performance, and how you can avoid them.

Questions this episode answers

What are the most common technical SEO mistakes according to the SEMrush study?

The study of 100,000 websites and 450,000,000 pages found that 30% of sites have broken internal links, about 26.5% have 4XX errors with 404 being most common, and 17% have the www domain configured incorrectly. These are classified as harmful issues.

How severe are broken internal links for SEO?

Broken internal links are classified as harmful issues by the article. 30% of websites have them, and fixing basic crawlability errors like these is compared to showing up for 90% of a sale, forming a foundation before other SEO improvements can help.

Why does an incorrectly configured www domain matter for SEO and users?

If a user types www before a domain and the site fails to load, that visitor is lost. 17% of websites in the study had this misconfiguration. The hosts note that some site owners dismiss it, but any user who hits a broken www version may never return.

In their words

they collected data on 100,000 websites and 450,000,000 pages

Host

30% of websites have broken internal links. Pay attention to 4XX errors. The most common is the 404, file not found error.

Host

17% had the www domain configured incorrectly.

Host
Terms defined in this episode
4XX errors
HTTP error codes indicating a client-side problem; the most common is the 404 file not found error, which signals a broken or missing page.
Crawlability
The ability of search engine bots to access and index a website's pages, forming the foundational layer of SEO alongside site structure.
www domain misconfiguration
A setup error where the www or non-www version of a domain fails to load, affecting 17% of websites in the SEMrush study.

Full transcript is being added.

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

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