Reading a site audit by severity

An audit that returns four hundred findings of equal weight is a backlog nobody starts. netweft gives every finding one of three severities, so the list has a top. There are 25 kinds of finding: 4 critical, 12 warnings and 9 info.

Critical: fix this week

These stop pages being crawled, indexed or reached at all.

• Server error. The page returned a 5xx. Search engines that keep seeing these crawl the site less.
• Broken internal link. A link on your own site points at a URL that errors. It wastes crawl budget and strands visitors.
• Missing title tag. The strongest on-page relevance signal is absent.
• Crawler was blocked. The site answered with a bot challenge or an access denial instead of the page.

That last one deserves a note. When the site answers 401, 403, 429 or 503, netweft reports that the crawl was refused rather than counting it as a page fault, because those codes are about the crawler, not about your SEO. The fix is to let the netweft-audit user agent through your bot protection and run the audit again. If Google meets the same wall, though, the finding is real.

Warning: this is where the ranking work is

Twelve kinds, and most audits are mostly warnings:

• duplicate titles, duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate content
• a missing h1 or a missing meta description
• conflicting canonicals: a page that is indexable while its canonical points elsewhere
• pages that return a 4xx, redirect chains of more than one hop
• orphan pages nothing links to, images without alt text
• thin content, under 200 words of visible text
• slow responses, over 1,500 milliseconds before the server answers

Duplicates usually come in groups, and a group is usually one template. Before fixing forty pages, read auditing by template.

Info: read, then decide

Nine kinds that are often deliberate:

• titles under 30 or over 60 characters, meta descriptions under 70 or over 160
• more than one h1, heading levels that skip a step
• pages more than four clicks from the home page
• pages that link nowhere
• pages set to noindex

A noindex page is the clearest example. It is fine if somebody meant it and a silent loss of traffic if nobody did. The audit cannot know which, so it tells you and lets you decide.

Every finding says how to fix it

Each finding carries an explanation and a fix in plain words, from the same registry the API returns, so the dashboard, an export and an agent reading list_audit_issues over MCP all describe it identically.

The crawl’s manners

The crawler identifies itself as netweft-audit, respects robots.txt, and costs 1 credit a page. A Pro audit crawls up to 1,000 pages and Pro runs 60 audits a month; Agency runs 300 audits of up to 5,000 pages. Running the audit after every significant deploy is an affordable habit, which is the point of making it cheap.