Your blog in the site audit

The site audit reads your pages and says what is wrong with them. When the pages belong to a blog we host, two things are different, and both are in your favour.

A finding on your post comes with its fix

Ordinarily a finding tells you what is wrong and you go and fix it in whatever system owns the page. For a post on a blog here, the finding links straight to the field in the editor that fixes it, with the right panel already open.

That works for the findings an editor can genuinely answer: a missing or overlong title, a missing or overlong description, a missing or undescribed cover picture, thin content, no headings, a picture with no alt text, a slug that could be better.

It deliberately does not work for one that looks like it should. An orphan page is a page nothing links to, and it is fixed by editing the other posts that ought to link to it. Sending you to the orphan itself would open a post with nothing visibly wrong with it, so that finding is left alone.

The crawler is not guessing

A hosted blog gives the audit a real sitemap, correct canonical addresses, a feed, and clean redirects. It is the difference between reading a site and interrogating it.

It also means nothing is missed for being new. A post published a minute ago is already a page the audit knows about and already a page the internal link pool can offer, rather than waiting for the next crawl.

Running it

Nothing about the blog changes how the audit is started: it is a thing a person presses, on the site's own SEO section, and it covers the blog's pages along with the rest of the site.

If the blog is on a subdomain, that is a different hostname, and the audit covers it as part of the same website rather than as a separate site to pay for.

What the audit will nag you about most

Two findings account for most of what a new blog gets told, and both are quick.

Descriptions. A post with no excerpt and no search description has nothing to put under its title in a result. The editor's Checks panel flags it while you are writing, which is cheaper than fixing forty of them later.

Alt text. An imported blog almost always arrives with pictures that have no description, because few platforms export one. The media library can filter to exactly those pictures, which makes it one sitting rather than a hunt.

Rewrites

The calendar's Rewrites view is pages you published that the audit has since found a problem with. A post on a hosted blog can be rewritten there and sent back here, and the rule about not overwriting your own edits applies exactly as it does everywhere else. See publishing calendar articles to your blog.