Indexable URLs: The Mother Of All SEO Indicators

Note: We changed the name from compliant to indexable in Botify to reflect SEO industry terminology. Nothing has changed except the name.

Get rid of the noise and hear the music loud and clear! That’s essentially what our new “SEO Compliant” indicator is about. It allows you to isolate URLs which meet basic SEO requirements, which is useful for two purposes:

• Find out which proportion of your website actually stands a good chance of ranking in search engine results pages
• See any indicator for compliant pages only – without letting non-compliant pages weigh on these indicators.

In Botify, an SEO-compliant URL is a URL which:

• Responds with an HTTP 200 (OK) status code. No redirection or error.
• Is not identified as an alternate version of another page: the page does not include a canonical tag to another URL. It can either have no canonical tag, or a canonical tag to itself.
• Has an HTML content type.
• Does not include any Noindex meta tag.

The Botify analysis flags all URLs as compliant or non-compliant, which means we can now look at one group or the other, for any indicator. The report highlights interesting indicators related to compliant URLs, and you can answer any additional questions using the URL Explorer, by applying the URL compliance filter to other criteria.

How Much “Noise” Is There On Your Website?

The proportion of non-compliant URLs in the website is the first interesting finding, and the report overview immediately provides the big picture with a graph from the distribution section:

It’s not uncommon to find heavy proportions of non-compliant URLs, as in the example below:

If visits data is available – in other words, if a Google Analytics account was connected to the project to enable data imports – the report overview also shows active pages (pages which generated at least one visit over the last 30 days), along with compliant vs non-compliant distribution for inactive pages:

Why Are URLs Non-Compliant?

The report also indicates the distribution of reasons (or combination of reasons) for non-compliance.

If you click on a slice in this pie chart, you’ll get the list of all URLs that are non-compliant for the selected reason, and find all information about these URLs in the URL Explorer.

In the URL Explorer, you can also see all non-compliant URLs and the reason why:
Use the “compliant = false” filter, select all four possible non-compliance reasons in the fields to display, and click on Apply:

So… what do you think? How does this compliance indicator answer your SEO analysis needs? Feedback welcome!