How search engines read your site

Before you fix anything, it helps to know what you are fixing it for. A search engine meets your website the same way every time, and each step is a place things can quietly go wrong.

The crawl — a very fast, very literal visitor

A search engine sends a program to read your site. It starts at a page it knows, reads the text, and follows every link it finds. Three things matter about this visitor:

It is literal. If a link points to a page that no longer exists, it walks into the wall — and remembers. Every dead link wastes a visit that could have gone to a real page.
It is on a budget. It will only read so many of your pages per visit. Dead ends, duplicate pages and redirect chains spend that budget on nothing.
It reads the code, not the screen. A page that looks fine to you can still be telling the crawler “do not index me” in its code, or hiding its text where the crawler does not look.

The index — the library card

Once read, a page is stored with a kind of library card: its title, its description, its headings, and what the page appears to be about. That card is mostly built from lines you control. When your report flags a missing heading or a duplicate title, it is telling you the library card is blank or confusing — so the librarian shelves you somewhere nobody looks.

The results page — the shop window

When a person searches, the engine picks pages from its index and shows each one as a little advert: the title as the blue link, the description underneath. You wrote both of those lines — or your website tool wrote something dull for you. This is why so many fixes in your report are about titles and descriptions: they are the only part of the results page you fully control.

The sitemap and robots file — your site’s own paperwork

Two small files tell the crawler what you have and what to skip: the sitemap (a list of every page you want found) and the robots file (the rules of the visit). A sitemap that lists dead pages, or a robots rule that blocks something important, misleads the crawler about your own site. Your report checks both.

The one-sentence summary

A search engine can only rank what it can read, understand and trust. Every fix in your report removes a reason it had to skip you. That is the whole game — and it is why the fixes are worth an afternoon of pasting.