The site health score

Every site Rankbank reads gets a number out of 100. It appears on the Site health tile on your Overview, on your card in the all-sites list, and in the change digest after every read.

It is a measure of one thing only: how much of your site is affected by structural problems Rankbank found while reading it. It is not a prediction of rankings, not a grade, and not something to compare against another website.

How it's worked out

There's a collapsible line on the Overview page labelled How the {score}/100 is worked out. Open it and Rankbank shows you the entire method, because a score you can't audit is a score you can't trust.

The explanation reads:

Every site starts at 100. Each kind of problem takes points off in proportion to how much of the site it touches — {n} pages here — so fixing anything can only push the score up, and a growing site is never punished for growing.

Underneath, one line per penalty:

−12 from a page has no main heading on 43 pages
−7 from a page almost nothing links to on 22 pages
−3 from a link on your site leads to a dead page on 9 pages

Three properties fall out of that design, and each one matters.

Fixing anything can only push the score up. There is no penalty that grows when you fix something else, and no scoring interaction that can make a repair look like a regression. If the score went down, something on your site got worse.

A growing site is never punished for growing. Penalties are proportional to how much of the site a problem touches, not to how many pages have it. Publish fifty good pages and the score doesn't drop just because your total page count went up. If it did, the score would quietly punish the thing you're paying it to help you do.

Every point is accounted for. The penalty lines add up to exactly the gap between 100 and your score. Nothing is hidden and nothing is fudged.

The change line

The Site health tile carries a hint under the number. With no previous read it counts what's open: "{n} open problems across {n} pages." Once there's a read to compare against it becomes one of three sentences: "Up {n} since the previous read.", "Down {n} since the previous read.", or "Unchanged since the previous read."

Green means up, amber means down. That colour is the only judgement Rankbank passes on the number, and it's a judgement about direction, not about level.

The Since your last read panel further down the page says the same thing in a longer form: "Site health moved from 61/100 to 68/100." or "Site health held at 68/100."

There are no bands

This is the part people expect and don't get. The health score has no "good", no "needs work", no red-amber-green thresholds, and no target.

Two sites with identical scores can be in completely different shape, because the score depends on which problems the site has and how much of it they touch. A ten-page brochure site with two problems and a thousand-page catalogue with two hundred can land in the same place.

What the number is genuinely good for is answering "did last week's work land?" You read the site, you fix things, you read it again, and the delta tells you. That's a real question with a real answer, and it's the only question this number reliably answers.

Authority is the score that does have named bands, five of them, with a sentence each. It measures something completely different: what the rest of the web thinks of your domain. Don't mix the two up. A site can sit at 92 health and 4 authority, and that combination is extremely common on new sites. It means your pages are clean and nobody has linked to you yet.

Where the score appears

• The Site health tile at the top of a site's Overview page, with its delta
• The Health figure on each card in the all-sites SEO list, with a small green or amber delta
• The first bullet of the Since your last read digest
• The How the {score}/100 is worked out disclosure, which only renders when there are penalties to show

Before your first read the tile shows a dash and the hint "Read the site and it gets a score."

Moving the number

Every penalty line names a problem type, and every problem type has a fix. Open the Problems to fix page and work the biggest families first, since a penalty proportional to pages affected means the family touching the most pages is worth the most points. Every problem type, explained tells you what each one means and what the fix actually is.

Then read the site again. The score only moves when Rankbank re-reads and finds the problem gone. See how Rankbank reads your site.