Most technical SEO problems are quiet. There is no error page and there is no alert. Traffic simply falls short, because a page was never indexed, or a signal was misread, or a fix from two years ago now works against the site. These are the ten Auditaar sees most often, and how to catch each one.
1. Pages Google discovered but never indexed
The most common problem, and the hardest one to spot, is when Search Console lists the pages under a status like Discovered or Crawled but not indexed. The pages are not in the index, so they cannot rank. It usually means thin content, weak internal linking, or a crawl-budget problem on a large site.
There is a full walkthrough in how to fix Discovered, currently not indexed.
2. Canonicals pointing at the wrong URL
A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page you prefer, and the engines treat it as a signal rather than a command. If you point it at the wrong URL, or if a template points every page at the homepage, then you can push ranking signals onto a page that was never meant to rank. Check that the canonical you declared is the one you intend, and check that Google actually picks it.
3. Titles and descriptions missing or duplicated
When a title tag is missing, the engine writes one for you, so you lose control over how the page appears in the results. When the same title is repeated across dozens of pages, those pages become hard to tell apart, which can lead an engine to show one of them and rank the others lower. Duplication on its own does not prove that one page is suppressing another.
4. Trackers firing before consent
This is a privacy and measurement issue rather than a ranking one, and it is common. When analytics and ad pixels load before the visitor answers the consent banner, they collect data without permission, which is one of the first things that a privacy review or a regulator will flag.
Trackers fire before anyone consents
5. No HTTPS, or a broken redirect to it
Serving anything over plain HTTP splits your signals and shows visitors a not-secure warning. The subtle version is worse: HTTPS works, but the HTTP version never redirects to it, so two copies of every page exist.
6. A largest-contentful-paint that only fails on mobile
Desktop looks fine, so nobody checks the phone, where most traffic is and where the largest image is often told to lazy-load. Core Web Vitals are measured on real mobile users, and this is the metric that most often quietly fails them.
The bands mark Google's good, needs-work and poor thresholds; the marker is a sample site.
7. Thin pages diluting the site
Word count on its own is not a measure of quality, but pages with very little real content often struggle to rank, and when there are many of them they can drag down how an engine judges the whole site. Check whether each page actually meets its purpose. The fix is usually to combine pages, not to pad them.
8. Orphan pages nothing links to
A page with no internal links pointing at it is a page an engine reaches late, if at all, and a reader never finds. Internal linking is the cheapest ranking lever most sites leave on the table.
9. Content invisible without JavaScript
If the words only appear after the browser runs JavaScript, then a crawler that reads the served HTML sees an empty page, and many AI engines that do not run JavaScript see the same empty page. Google can render JavaScript, but it does not do so for every page or every crawler, so the content in the served HTML is the reliable version to index.
10. Structured data that is missing or invalid
When Organization schema is missing, you give up structured signals that a competitor may be providing. FAQPage schema no longer earns FAQ rich results in Google, which retired them in May 2026 (Google Search Central), so recommend markup that matches the content and points to a search feature that Google still supports. FAQ structure still helps readers and AI engines parse a page, it just no longer shows as a Google rich result. Invalid schema can also suppress the very features it was meant to earn, so validate any markup before you ship it.
Technical SEO FAQ
How do I find these on my own site?
Search Console surfaces the indexing ones; a crawler finds the canonical and linking ones; PageSpeed covers the vitals. A whole-site audit like Auditaar checks all ten in one pass and scores each, so you see them together rather than in three separate tools.
Which of the ten should I fix first?
Fix them by cost, not by category. The indexing and canonical mistakes usually come at the top of an ordered plan, because they decide whether a page can be indexed and ranked at all. Score points are a way to set priorities, not a measure of how much traffic was lost.
Auditaar checks every mistake on this list from a single URL, scores each into the A-Score, and ranks the fixes by the points they earn back. Run it on your site, or see what's in the report.