Technical SEO
& performance audit
in Philadelphia

Arguments about crawl budget are usually arguments about guesses. The server log settles them, because it records every request a crawler made, when, and what it received.

What the log shows that no other source does: which pages get requested often, which get requested rarely, which never get requested at all, and how much of the crawling is spent on pages nobody should care about. On a large site the last figure is frequently the largest.

The usual offenders are mechanical. Parameter combinations from filters and sorting create effectively unlimited addresses, each of which looks new. Paginated archives run far deeper than anything a reader would reach. Internal search result pages get discovered and crawled. Old redirect chains get followed link by link. None of this is visible in a sitemap, and all of it competes with the pages that matter.

The reading order we use. First, group requests by page type rather than by URL, because the pattern lives at the type level. Second, compare the share of requests each type receives against its share of value. Third, look at what was returned: a type answering with redirects or errors is consuming budget and producing nothing.

Then the fixes, in order of effect. Close the address space that should not exist, using the mechanism appropriate to each case rather than one blanket rule. Flatten redirect chains to a single hop. Make sure the pages that matter are reachable in few clicks, because crawl frequency follows internal link structure closely.

One caution about sitemaps. A sitemap is a hint about what exists and when it changed. It does not raise priority, and submitting one does not cause a recrawl. Pages a crawler reaches easily through links get visited more than pages that only appear in a file.

What the report contains: requests by page type before and after, share spent on pages that should not be crawled, average hops to the pages that matter, and the change in how often those pages were actually visited. The last number is the one that proves the work.

Philadelphia businesses can order a technical audit with fixes from ~$600, or add speed and security work at ~$800. A focused audit runs two to four weeks, as this page states. Structured data sits inside that scope. Many sites carry markup that does nothing for them.

Schema markup has two jobs. It describes the page to search engines. It also makes the page eligible for rich results. Eligibility is all it buys; Google decides whether to show the feature.

Most problems are mismatches. Markup must describe content a visitor can see on that page. A rating in JSON-LD with no reviews on the page. A price that differs from the visible one. An Organization block copied onto every URL. Each of these gets ignored at best and can draw a manual action at worst.

Required and recommended properties differ per type. A missing required property makes the item invalid. A missing recommended one only weakens it. The Rich Results Test reports both. The schema.org validator checks syntax alone and says nothing about Google eligibility.

Some features have narrowed. FAQ rich results now show mainly for well-known government and health sites, and HowTo results were retired. Old markup for them does no harm. It will not bring the snippet back either.

Templates generate the markup, so errors repeat at scale. One broken date format in an article template breaks every post. The enhancement reports in Search Console count affected items per type. We fix the template and watch that count fall.

Format is a smaller decision. Google recommends JSON-LD. Microdata still works, but it is woven into the visible markup, so a redesign breaks it quietly. Two formats describing the same entity double the chance of a conflict.

Connect the nodes. An @id on the Organization lets WebSite, WebPage and LocalBusiness blocks reference it. Then the address and logo live in one place instead of five copies that drift apart.

Review stars have limits. Reviews a business publishes about itself on its own LocalBusiness or Organization markup are not eligible for star snippets. Product and recipe pages can qualify. A location page cannot.

Pick the type that matches the page. LocalBusiness on a location page. BreadcrumbList across the site. Article on posts. One accurate block does more than five decorative ones.