Introduction to Site Audit

Site Audit is our website auditing tool that lets you run scheduled technical SEO audits.

Site Audit follows a pre-set hierarchy:

Projects

Shows a list of projects, along with a few crawl stats: last crawl date, status, and next scheduled audit.

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Project history page

Shows all your crawls in an audit log, along with historical graphs for a few categories. To open it, click on a project’s name.

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Overview

Shows all the SEO issues found in an audit. To open it, click on one of the crawls in the audit log table.

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TIP

You can also navigate backwards by clicking on the breadcrumbs.

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Below are some actionable ways to manage your projects in Site Audit.

Customize global issues

Site Audit scans your website for 170+ pre-defined technical and on-page SEO issues.

Based on their level of importance, issues are divided into:

  • Errors (red) - The most important and need to be fixed as soon as possible.

  • Warnings (yellow) - Not as critical, but still require a fix.

  • Notices (blue) - Work as a nudge. Fix them after errors and warnings.

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However, issues are not universal across all websites. For example, we classify orphan pages as errors, but this might not hold true for an ecommerce store that sells seasonal products and discontinues certain pages during off season.

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Since errors contribute to a lower website health score, you can solve cases like this by configuring issues to suit your website’s needs. Just click on Issue settings in Site Audit’s main page.

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To change an issue’s level of importance, click on the dropdown and select the importance level you see most fit.

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You can also toggle issues on and off globally, as well as choose whether to add the issue to future new projects.

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NOTE

Turning an issue off will remove the issue from existing projects. If you disable Add to new projects, the issue will remain in the existing projects, but it won’t be added in future projects.


To toggle issues on or off at a project level, click on Turn off for this project under Top Issues (Overview report) or the All issues report.

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TIP

Depending on your user role, you can change issues as follows:

  • Workspace admins and owners - Can adjust any project’s issues

  • Members - Can set issues for assigned projects & modify their own custom issues

  • Guests - Can't create custom issues


Control crawl credits usage

Depending on your pricing plan, you may consume between 10.000 and 5 million crawl credits/month.

Only internal HTML pages that return the 200 (OK) HTTP status code consume crawl credits. These are pages that are visible to both search engines and readers.

The following types of URLs don’t consume crawl credits:

  • Redirects (3XX)

  • Broken pages (4XX) or server errors (5XX)

  • Resources (images, CSS files, and JS files)

  • Any external URLs linked from your website

To control your crawl credit usage, click on Open project settings under the gear icon and specify the Max number of internal pages.

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NOTE

For each verified project, the first 5,000 crawl credits per month spent to crawl this project is free. This is available for users on all plans.

About this course

How to use Ahrefs

64 lessons
3h 24m
Learn practical ways to use Ahrefs' SEO tools and reports to improve SEO.

What you’ll learn

  • How to analyze yours and your competitors’ websites with Site Explorer

  • How to master keyword research with Keywords Explorer

  • How to improve your on-page and technical SEO with Site Audit

  • How to track and improve your Google rankings with Rank Tracker

  • How to discover untapped keyword and link building opportunities with Content Explorer

  • How to get keyword and link building opportunities on autopilot with Alerts

Course by

Andrei ȚițAndrei Țiț is a product marketer at Ahrefs. He develops content to help you make the most out of Ahrefs.
Sam OhSam Oh is VP of Marketing at Ahrefs. He incorporates his commitment to education and love for entrepreneurship into actionable and easy-to-digest tutorials.