Free toolGuide
How to read your site's X-ray
The X-ray shows your site the way a search engine crawls it: as pages connected by links. Here is how to read the map, and which problems to fix before the rest.
Why site structure matters for SEO
Search engines find your pages by following links, the same way the map in your report is drawn. A page nothing links to is hard for Google to find and, when it does, it gets little of your site's authority. A page four or five clicks from the homepage gets less attention than one two clicks away.
Structure is also how Google works out what your site is about. Pages on the same subject that link to each other form a clear cluster. The same pages scattered with no links between them look like unrelated fragments, and each one has to rank on its own.
Reading the map
Every dot is a page we read and every line is an internal link between two of them. The homepage is the green dot, usually near the centre. Amber dots are pages with at least one problem, and red ones answered with an error. The faint dots around the edge are addresses we found in your links but did not have time to read.
A healthy small site looks like a tight cluster with a few hubs: the homepage, a blog index, a product page. Long chains of single pages hanging off each other usually mean pagination, or navigation that only links one level down. Isolated dots with no lines are orphans.
The problems worth fixing first
Broken internal links come first, because they waste both a visitor's click and a crawler's time. After that, pages with no links pointing at them, since no amount of on-page work helps a page Google cannot reach.
Duplicate titles are next. When six pages share the title of your homepage, Google has to guess which one to show, and it often picks the wrong one or none. Missing descriptions and headings matter less for rankings but a lot for clicks, because they are what people read in the results.
Links to other sites that now return errors are easy to miss and look careless to readers. The report lists each one with the page it is on.
Internal links worth adding
The suggestions pair pages that cover related topics but do not link to each other yet, and show the words they share. Adding a sentence with a link from one to the other helps readers find the next useful page, and tells search engines the two belong together.
Link from the page that already gets visits to the one that needs them, and use words that describe the destination rather than "click here". A handful of well-placed internal links often does more for a new page than weeks of waiting.
