We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common Technical SEO Issues

There’s a lot that can go wrong on a website, and every site is going to have some issues tofix.

We looked at 1,002,165 domains to find the most common technical SEO issues. Keep reading to see what wefound.

These are the issues flagged the most across the 1 million+ domains. The number is the percentage of domains where the issues were found on at least one of theirpages.

These are the most common issues, but every website is different. You can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit to get reports about the issues on your own website. This is free for verified sites with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account.

I made a sheet with the rest of the issues if you just want the data. If you want my commentary on the top issues and prioritization for fixing them, keep reading.

3XX redirect – 95.2% ofsites

Most sites use redirects, and it’s not usually anything to worry about. Sites, and the web in general, are always changing. We ran a study that found that ~two-thirds of links to pages on the web disappeared in the nine-year period we looked at.

I’d be concerned if there are redirect loops, where a page gets redirected infinitely, or when there is a long chain of redirects. Google will follow up to five redirect hops in one session. And when it resumes crawling in the next session, it will follow up to five more. Anything over 10 hops won’t consolidate signals (like links) properly to the finalURL.

You can find both of these in the “Issues” tab...