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https://news.ycombinator.com

SEO

· 12 checks — Canonical, meta, content depth, internal links, image SEO, and hreflang rolled into one auditable list.
SCORE
82
GRADE
B
FIX
0
REVIEW
7
PASS
4
INFO
1

Cross-tab audit — SEO, performance, crawlability, mobile, structured data

Checks
12
4 PASS 7 REVIEW
B
Canonical URL
Minor issues
REVIEW
Minor issues
Warning::
No canonical tag found
Search engines will determine the canonical URL themselves, which may cause duplicate content issues.
No Canonical URL Set
Page URL https://news.ycombinator.com Canonical (not set)

Search engines will determine the canonical URL themselves, which may cause duplicate content issues.

Why this matters

Without a canonical, Google may treat each URL variant (with/without slash, with tracking params, http/https) as duplicate content and split ranking.

Learn more ▾

A canonical link tells Google which URL is the 'real' one when multiple URLs serve identical content. Without it, link equity gets split across variants and none of them rank as well as a single canonical version would. One <link rel="canonical"> tag in <head> covers it.

Source: Google Search Central

B
Meta Tags
Title: 11 chars
REVIEW
Title: 11 chars
Info::
Page title is set
Got: Hacker News
Warning::
Title is only 11 characters — consider expanding
Warning::
No meta description tag found
Without a meta description, Google auto-generates a snippet from page content -- usually less click-attractive than a hand-written summary. Add `<meta name="description" content="...">` with a 70-160 char summary.
Title

"Hacker News"

11 characters Too short
Robots: Indexable (no restrictions)

Without a meta description, Google auto-generates a snippet from page content -- usually less click-attractive than a hand-written summary. Add `<meta name="description" content="...">` with a 70-160 char summary.

Why this matters

No meta description -- Google auto-generates a SERP snippet from page content, usually less click-attractive than a hand-written summary.

Learn more ▾

Meta description is shown as the snippet under the title in search results. A well-written description significantly improves click-through rate. Add `<meta name="description" content="...">` with a 70-160 character summary.

Source: Google Search Central

B
Content Depth
750 words, Standard
REVIEW
750 words, Standard
Info::
Page has 750 words of content
Info::
Reading level: Standard (grade 7)
750 words

Good depth

Reading level

Very Easy
Easy
Fairly Easy
Standard
Fairly Difficult
Difficult
Very Difficult

Grade 7

Text-to-HTML Ratio

12% text 88% HTML

4 KB / 34 KB

B
Image SEO
2 images, 0 descriptive filenames
REVIEW
2 images, 0 descriptive filenames
Warning::
100% of images have non-descriptive filenames
Search engines use filenames as a signal. Rename to descriptive names like 'team-photo.jpg'.
Info::
2 image(s) missing alt text — see Accessibility tab
0 descriptive
0 hash-based
2 generic
2 total
FilenameQualityAltIssues
y18.svggeneric✗2
s.gifgeneric✗2

See Accessibility tab for detailed alt text quality analysis.

Search engines use filenames as a signal. Rename to descriptive names like 'team-photo.jpg'.

Why this matters

Most image filenames are non-descriptive (hash/IMG_X) — small SEO miss for Image Search ranking.

Source: Google Image SEO

C
Sitemap Freshness
Action
No sitemap.xml found
REVIEW
No sitemap.xml found
Info::
No sitemap.xml found
Sitemaps help search engines discover and prioritize URLs. Not strictly required for small sites where every page is linked from the homepage, but recommended once a site grows beyond a few dozen URLs.
C
Sitemap × Robots Consistency
Action
Sitemap or robots.txt missing -- consistency check skipped
REVIEW
Sitemap or robots.txt missing -- consistency check skipped
Info::
Cross-check skipped (sitemap or robots.txt absent)
B
Markup Quality
2 markup-quality issue(s) detected
REVIEW
2 markup-quality issue(s) detected
Warning::
No `<meta charset>` declaration in HTML
The page has no `<meta charset="...">` tag. Browsers fall back to a default encoding (typically UTF-8 in modern browsers, but not guaranteed). Add `<meta charset="utf-8">` as the first child of `<head>` to make the encoding explicit.
Info::
1 deprecated HTML4 element(s) used
Elements removed from the HTML spec: <center>. Modern browsers still render these for backward-compat, but accessibility tools and HTML validators flag them as errors. Replace `<center>` with CSS `text-align: center` or flexbox; `<font>` with CSS color/font-family/font-size; `<marquee>` with CSS animation; `<frameset>`/`<frame>` with iframes or modern layout primitives.
A+
Hreflang URL Quality
No hreflang tags on the page
PASS
No hreflang tags on the page
Info::
No hreflang tags on the page
A+
Sitemap Hygiene
No sitemap to evaluate -- depth check is N/A
PASS
No sitemap to evaluate -- depth check is N/A
Info::
No sitemap fetched -- depth check skipped
A+
Schema Markup Audit
Per-type completeness vs Schema.org requirements + rich-result eligibility
PASS

No structured data detected

Without JSON-LD or microdata, this page can't qualify for any of Google's rich result formats. Even basic Organization or WebSite schema is a quick win.

Hreflang
0 hreflang tags
INFO
0 hreflang tags

No hreflang tags detected.

Hreflang tags are only needed for multilingual or multi-regional sites.

All checks on this page are automated. Results are estimates - run targeted manual reviews when the score affects a release decision.

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