To help answer these questions and gauge the health of websites, I like to use a tool called Siteliner. This free service lets you explore your website, revealing critical issues that affect your site's performance and search engine rankings. It gives you benchmarks on how your site compares to competitor sites in key performance categories like:
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be a tricky animal. It's possible for your site to contain large amounts of duplicate content without you even knowing it. This happens if your post tags and archived pages are being indexed separately, or if you don't have your canonical URLs set up correctly. Blog posts can be tagged and put into many different categories, this puts them into different databases. You can have a copy of the same post in both a tagged database and an archived database. If you don't have your <no-index> markup code set up correctly, you run the risk of search engines indexing both copies of your post, giving you duplicate content. This duplicate content can lower your site's search rankings, and drags down valuable traffic in the process. Siteliner scans your website for internal duplicate content, providing you with a detailed report so that you can take action to correct the issues.
Broken Links
No one likes visiting a website to land on a page that gives you a 404 error. Broken links give your visitors a horrible user experience and also lower your site's search rankings. Siteliner will crawl your site and provides you a report of all the broken links that plague your website. Make it a priority to analyze this report and go through the backend of your site to redirect all broken links. Correcting these errors will give your users a better experience, and you'll see an upward trend in the search rankings, driving more organic traffic to your site.
Power Pages
Do you know which pages on your website are the most prominent according to search engines? Understanding these pages can help you analyze which content is most popular with your audience, giving you the ability to create more content similar to it. Siteliner tells you which pages on your website have the most power based on inbound and internal links. Use this knowledge to create additional content that you know your audience will find valuable.
Reports
Siteliner will create detailed reports, giving you all the essential information you'll need to audit your site's health and give it an SEO facelift if needed. The free Siteliner service is limited to monthly analyses of sites up to 250 pages. The Siteliner Premium service allows you to analyze websites that have up to 25,000 pages, with no limitations on how often analyses are run.
A healthy website is a user-friendly and search engine friendly website. Happy users stay on websites longer, purchase more products and tell people about their experiences. Search engines recognize the amount of time spent on your site and correlate that to a website that visitors gain value from, resulting in higher ranking. Conducting regular site audits like this are something every website owner should do to gauge the health of their websites.
Siteliner scans your website for internal duplicate content, providing you with a detailed report so that you can take action to correct the issues.