u/OlgaCassibry97

I've been seeing a lot of URLs with "alternate page with proper canonical tag" in google search console and I keep wondering if this is something that i should be worried about or it's just an expected behavior.

My understanding is that these pages have canonical tags pointing to different URLs and google is respecting it, which is fine but the sheer volume of these in one site makes me wonder if everything is setup properly.

When is this considered a problem i.e. Is there a scenario where a large number of alternate pages with canonical tags in a site signifies that there's something wrong in the site's architecture?

I had a client site that was quietly blocking google bots for weeks but before anyone noticed, rankings has already tanked and it took a while for me to figure out why. Since then, I have been paranoid about robot.txt issues on any site I touch.

I do this manually but I'm wondering if there's any reliable robot.txt checker tool that does this job automatically and well especially for larger sites that has multiple directives that might conflict with each other.

What tool do you use to check and validate robot.txt? Kindly share your experience (if any) from a misconfigured file and how you were able to resolve it.

Depending on where I look, I keep seeing different answers, some said one word, others said two while the rest said anything less than three counts.

This matters to me because it changes how I categorize keywords when I am building content for my clients. I wouldn't want to be targeting what i think are short tail keywords and building content strategies around them when the definition is wrong.

What's the actual working definition you use? And does the distinction between short tail and mid tail matter that much in practice or are they mostly semantics at this point?

I've been trying different SEO checker tools for different projects and I noticed they give different scores and recommendations for the same site. It has gotten to a point where I don't know which one to choose.

While some flag issues others completely ignore, some give you a score of 100 that feels totally arbitrary and a lot of the "fixes" they suggest don't have any real impact on the rankings.

So which SEO tools do you find very useful and which ones are totally noise?

I'm looking for something that gives actionable output rather than just a long list of minor issues.

After auditing couple of sample sites with meta tag tools, I'm starting to wonder if they actually do anything other than the basics. They flag missing meta descriptions and title length issues. Stuff I'd catch manually anyway.

I need something that can tell whether my meta tags are competitive enough for the keywords I'm targeting not just tell if they are valid and right character count.

Is there a meta tag analyzer tool that goes deeper than the surface level checks or is the real analysis dependent on manual checks and common sense at this point?

After auditing couple of sample sites with meta tag tools, I'm starting to wonder if they actually do anything other than the basics. They flag missing meta descriptions and title length issues. Stuff I'd catch manually anyway.

I need something that can tell whether my meta tags are competitive enough for the keywords I'm targeting not just tell if they are valid and right character count.

Is there a meta tag analyzer tool that goes deeper than the surface level checks or is the real analysis dependent on manual checks and common sense at this point?