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Site Crawl runs weekly and produces 1,000+ issues on most accounts. The skill is knowing which 10 issues actually move rankings. This walks through the triage order that closes the audit instead of inflating it.
Who this is forOwners or marketers whose Moz Campaign Health is stuck below 75 and the issue list is overwhelming. If you've been 'fixing' the audit for 2+ months and the number isn't moving, this is the reset.
What you'll need
Step 1
Campaign → Site Crawl → All Issues. Filter to Critical severity only. Sort by URLs affected descending.
Open your Moz Pro Campaign. Click Site Crawl in the left rail. The summary shows total issues across four severity buckets: Critical, Warning, Notice, SEO Best Practice.
Click All Issues. Apply two filters: severity = Critical, and sort = URLs affected descending.
Critical issues are the ones that materially affect indexing and rankings. Warnings and Notices are mostly stylistic. Best Practice items are recommendations.
Your top 5-10 Critical issues by URL count almost always represent 80%+ of the available ranking lift. The long tail of one-off issues rarely moves anything.
Step 2
Site Crawl → Critical → 4xx errors. Cross-reference with Link Explorer to find which 4xx pages have inbound backlinks. 301 those first.
Open Critical → 4xx errors. Export the list.
Open Link Explorer → enter your domain → Inbound Links. Cross-reference: which of your 4xx URLs have inbound links from external sites?
Every 4xx page with even 1 inbound link is leaking authority. 301-redirect each to the closest live page. If no clean redirect target exists, recreate the page at the original URL.
Critical impact: a 4xx page with 10 inbound DR 30+ links is leaking authority you can recover in 30-45 days post-redirect.
Step 3
Site Crawl → Critical → Noindex tags. Audit which pages should genuinely be noindexed; remove the tag from any that shouldn't.
Open Critical → 'Pages with noindex meta tag.' Review the list carefully.
Legitimate noindex: thank-you pages, internal search results, staging URLs, /tag/ archives, /author/ pages with thin content.
Mistakes: money pages (/pricing, /features, /signup), blog posts, and category pages with noindex usually got there from a misconfigured plugin, a staging-import, or a CMS-default rule nobody disabled.
For each mistake: remove the meta robots noindex tag (CMS settings or template). Re-submit to GSC for re-indexing via URL Inspection.
Critical impact: a noindex on a money page silently removes it from search results. Easy to miss for months. The traffic drop is usually instant once Google re-crawls and respects the tag.
Step 4
Site Crawl → Critical → Redirect chains. Collapse A → B → C → D to A → D. Fix loops immediately.
Open Critical → Redirect chains and Redirect loops.
Chains: a request to /old-page → /intermediate → /final-page. Google discounts authority across multi-hop chains. Always 301 directly to the final destination.
Loops: /a → /b → /a. These break crawl entirely. Find the source (usually conflicting redirect rules in .htaccess, Next.js config, or a Cloudflare worker) and resolve the conflict.
Bulk fix: most chains share a source rule. Fix the rule once, not each redirect individually.
Critical impact: collapsing chains typically lifts ranking on the affected pages 5-15 positions within 30-45 days.
Step 5
Site Crawl → Critical → Duplicate content. Add rel="canonical" to point each near-duplicate at the primary version.
Open Critical → Duplicate content (or 'Pages with very similar content').
Common sources: paginated category pages, parameter URLs (?utm=, ?sort=), printer-friendly versions, and AMP/non-AMP duplicates.
Fix at the source: add rel='canonical' pointing each duplicate at the canonical URL. For parameter URLs, set canonical to the clean URL.
Don't 'fix' by deleting one duplicate — you might break inbound links. Canonical tags handle it cleanly.
Critical impact: clearing duplicates lets Google concentrate ranking authority on the canonical version. Typically 10-25% ranking lift on the affected money pages.
Step 6
Site Crawl → Critical → Invalid canonical. Point each canonical at a working URL or remove the tag.
Open Critical → 'Canonical points to 4XX' or 'Invalid canonical.'
For each flagged URL, check the rel='canonical' tag in the HTML head. If it points to a dead URL, Google may not index either page properly.
Fix: update the canonical to a live URL, or remove the canonical tag if it's not needed.
Common source: bulk-deleted pages whose canonicals still reference each other (set up before deletion).
Critical impact: pages with broken canonicals can drop out of the index entirely — this is a ranking emergency.
Step 7
Site Crawl → Warnings → Title tag issues. Write unique 50-60 char titles for each affected page.
Even though missing/duplicate titles are flagged as Warnings (not Critical), they meaningfully affect CTR — fix after Critical.
Open Warnings → filter for title issues: missing, duplicate, too long, too short.
Missing: write a 50-60 character title with the primary keyword for the page.
Duplicate: rewrite each to be unique. Most common cause: category pages with paginated URLs sharing one title — template the page number into the title.
Bulk fix: most CMSs support templated titles. Set the template at the type level (post, category, product) before editing individual pages.
Step 8
After every batch of fixes, trigger a manual Site Crawl. Confirm issues drop off the list before moving to the next batch.
After shipping a batch of fixes, wait 1-3 days for CDN caches to clear, then trigger a manual Site Crawl (Campaign → Site Crawl → Recrawl).
Validate that the issues you fixed actually drop off the next report. If they don't, the fix didn't propagate (CDN cache, conflicting rule, template still emitting the issue).
Track Campaign Health over time. A clean closure of the first audit pass should lift Health 10-25 points. Subsequent quarterly passes maintain it.
Document each fix in a sheet — date, issue, fix, validation result. Six months from now, you'll need this when something regresses.
Common mistakes
Fixing Warnings and Notices before Critical
What goes wrong: You spend 3 weekends fixing missing alt-text on 800 images while broken canonicals on your top 10 pages remain. Campaign Health goes up 3 points but rankings don't move. Pure vanity work.
How to avoid: Always sort by Severity = Critical, then URLs affected descending. Fix the top 5-10 Critical issues before touching Warnings.
Treating every flagged issue as wrong
What goes wrong: You remove noindex from /author/joe-smith because Moz flagged it as 'Noindex on indexable page.' Author archive pages are thin content; the noindex was intentional. You re-index 200 thin pages and Google's quality signals demote your domain.
How to avoid: Read each Critical issue with judgment. Moz flags everything; you decide what's intentional vs a mistake. Author archives, /tag/ pages, thank-you pages are usually intentional noindex.
Not re-crawling after fixes
What goes wrong: You ship 20 fixes but don't re-crawl. The Campaign Health still shows old issues. You can't tell what's actually fixed vs what's broken in a new way. You stop fixing because progress feels invisible.
How to avoid: After every batch of fixes (typically 10-20 issues), trigger a recrawl. Confirm fixes propagate before moving to the next batch. Visible progress maintains momentum.
Fixing one-off URLs instead of template-level patterns
What goes wrong: You fix 50 individual broken internal links pointing at /old-product. The category template is still generating these links daily. The issues re-appear in next week's crawl. Whack-a-mole forever.
How to avoid: When you see a pattern in errors (same target URL, same source template, same regex), fix at the template/source level, not URL by URL.
Ignoring the Campaign Health trend
What goes wrong: Campaign Health drops 12 points after a deploy and you don't notice for two weeks. The deploy regression compounds — new pages without canonicals, broken redirects from a path change. Fixing it later takes 3x the effort.
How to avoid: Set Campaign Health alerts for drops > 5 points. Review weekly. Catch regressions inside the deploy cycle, not after the next quarterly audit.
Fixing issues on noindexed pages
What goes wrong: You spend 6 hours fixing missing meta descriptions on /tag/ archive pages that are noindexed. The pages aren't in the index — the fixes have zero ranking impact.
How to avoid: Before fixing any issue on a page, check the noindex status. If noindex is intentional, skip every other issue on that page. Focus effort on indexable pages only.
Recap
Done — what's next
How to set up a Moz Pro Campaign the right way
Read the next tutorial
Hand it off
Site Crawl fixes are a one-time sprint that should turn into a quarterly habit. A vetted technical SEO specialist on EverestX will close the current backlog, set up regression alerts, and own the recurring review — typically $400-1,000/mo at $14-16/hr.
See specialist rates
4-8 hours of focused work for a 5K-URL site. 12-20 hours for a 50K-URL site. The first pass is the hardest; quarterly maintenance after that is 2-4 hours per pass.
Top 10 Critical issues by URL count deliver 80%+ of the available impact. The long tail of one-off issues rarely moves rankings. Don't chase a 100% Campaign Health — chase ranking lift.
Critical fixes (noindex removal, broken canonical fixes): 1-3 weeks after re-crawl. Performance and Core Web Vitals fixes: 30-60 days. Content depth changes: 60-90 days. Internal linking changes: 30-45 days.
No. Delete first, set up 301 redirects, then re-crawl. Fixing issues on pages that will be gone in two weeks is wasted effort.
Multiple H1s is fine in HTML5 and Google has confirmed it doesn't affect rankings. Moz flags it because some older SEO guidelines treated it as a warning. Treat the audit as a checklist, not a mandate — use judgment per issue type.
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