What are the top technical SEO issues that can negatively impact a website’s performance?

In my view, technical SEO is the foundation of a website’s performance, and addressing issues proactively makes a big difference. Based on my experience, here are the most common technical SEO issues I’ve encountered and how I handle them:

1. Slow Loading Speed: A slow site frustrates users and search engines. According to my understanding, I address this by optimizing images, enabling browser caching, minifying code, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce server response times.
2. Broken Links and 404 Errors: I’ve seen these impact both user experience and SEO. I regularly use tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to find broken links and either fix them, redirect them with 301s, or create relevant replacement content.
3. Duplicate Content: In my view, duplicate content confuses search engines and dilutes rankings. I use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page and ensure my content management system is configured to avoid duplicates.
4. Poor Mobile Usability: As per my understanding, mobile-friendliness is a major ranking factor. I test sites with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and fix issues like unresponsive designs, text that’s too small, or elements that are too close together.
5. Indexing Issues: I often encounter pages that aren’t being indexed due to noindex tags or robots.txt rules. I review these settings carefully and submit a clean XML sitemap to Google Search Console to ensure important pages are crawled.
6. Orphan Pages: I’ve found that pages without internal links can be overlooked by search engines. I address this by linking to these pages from relevant parts of the site to integrate them into the overall structure.
7. Redirect Chains and Loops: These can waste crawl budget and slow down user navigation. I use tools to identify and resolve unnecessary redirects by updating links to point directly to the destination.
8. Core Web Vitals Issues: In my view, metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) significantly impact rankings. I focus on improving server response times, optimizing fonts, and ensuring stable loading of layout elements.
9. Structured Data Errors: As per my experience, incorrect or missing structured data can prevent rich results from appearing in search. I use Schema Markup tools to validate and fix errors.
10. Thin Content: Pages with little or no value can harm rankings. I either improve these pages by adding useful content or noindex them if they don’t serve a purpose.

For me, the key to addressing technical SEO issues is regular audits and staying proactive. Fixing these issues not only helps with rankings but also enhances the overall user experience.