#7250 – Number of issues with website - are sh404SEF settings correct?

Hi Alecia,

I don't see anything on that list that seems related to sh404SEF itself. sh404SEF can help you fix some of those issues though, for instance:

404 page

All 404s should be listed in the 404 manager so by sorting them by date you can see which ones are actually hitting people - compared to 404s that nobody ever sees. This can help prioritize your 404 error fixing. I assume ahrefs already provided you with the page on which those bad links are found so you can fix them but if not, sh404SEF can sometimes provide you with the referrer information for 404s (click the + in the "Details" column). Referrer is not always there though now that most sites are under HTTPS.

Page has links to redirect

If those links are internal, ie your own site, you may be doing some redirects with sh404SEF - which is OK but maybe you kept the old links in your content and that's what you need to change

Meta description tag missing or empty

Meta description too short

sh404SEF will normally create a description for you when missing but what it can find depends on the page content and also on the particular extension creating the page. It does allow you to set a description manually for any page on your site, regardless of the extension so at least you can fix that.

Title too short

Title too long

sh404SEF will create titles automatically on for Joomla articles. They should not too short with the default settings. For all other pages, you are also able to manually enter a title if worth the work.

Open Graph tags incomplete

Twitter card missing

Open Graph tags missing

OGP tags and Twitter cards will always be included by sh404SEF as soon as you enable that feature (it's on by default actually) under "Social SEO".
They will be complete, the only that could be missing is an image. sh404SEF will auto-detect images in your content to be included in the OGP/TCards tag but if your content does not have any image, then we just can't find one. You can manually set an OGP image on a per URL basis from the URL manager, for your entire site.

Duplicate pages without canonical

At least for Joomla content, you won't have duplicate pages, ie same content with multiple URLs. You need to look into the specifics of which pages they consider duplicates and where they found them. If required, you can add canonicals manually per URL, or on a batch of URLs with simple canonical rules to fix that problem for other extensions.

Now very importantly please consider that ahrefs is throwing everything they can at you. Not all of those things matter and not all of them need fixing. That's where a SEO should step in and look at each individual URLs flagged, see what that mean and whether it needs action.

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier
weeblr.com
@weeblr