ahrefs.com - free webmaster tools

For the free Webmaster Tools from - https://ahrefs.com - I would like to thank them with this blog post. Based on ahrefs’ advice, I have really tinkered a lot with this website over the last few weeks. You can’t see it on the surface, but the changes are quite intense. Little by little, I will publish an updated version of many blog posts with the changes that have been made.

Actually, I never wanted to use the services of an SEO marketing agency. Tekki-tipps.de is a niche website without financial interests. For this reason alone, I would not even want to afford the cheapest “Lite Plan” from ahrefs.com for 89 € per month. I run this website because I want to live my passion as a web programmer.

“Health Score” of the own website

So far, I have concentrated on technical SEO errors and tips about my website. The “Health Score” from ahrefs is very helpful here. The “Health Score” shows the percentage of internal URLs on your website that have no errors. When I created the account, I had a “Health Score” of 67%. Actually, I thought that I had worked very cleanly so far. When I first saw the result, my first reaction was disbelief, then rejection, which slowly turned into insight and the will to change. In the meantime, the “health score” for tekki-tipps.de is 100%:

• ahrefs.com - How to use the Overview report

Even though I have now reached 100%, this does not mean that I will not work on further technical improvements based on ahrefs hints.

Technical SEO changes

Apart from small things like too short h1 HTML tags, three major construction sites were pointed out to me:

• Oversized images
• Link rel=alternate - missing self-reference and x-default
• Open Graph link does not match Canonical link

Oversized images

I knew that my pictures were oversized. But I didn’t care because I wanted good quality. I have now changed this for the header images and don’t notice any quality disadvantage. I will publish another article on this. The tool I use for converting to webp images I have described in the article - macOS App - Quick Webp Avif Image Converter .

The post - Hugo - Page Bundle shortcodes for images - I still need to revise. At the moment, I haven’t adjusted my shortcodes yet.

Link rel=alternate - missing self-reference and x-default

Actually, the generation of rel=alternate links in the head of each web page by Hugo is quite simple. It gets more complicated with the paginated pages. I use these for the teaser list of the start page and for the tag lists. In my blog post - SEO - Self-referencing hreflang on multilingual website - I describe my approach in detail.

Why do you need the page/X/ URL extension?

This already starts with the canonical link. Every web page must have a unique URL. Paginated content has the extension /page/X/. This must be taken into account for self-generated links in the baseof.html. The article - Hugo - Canonical Pagination Links for Blog Posts and Tags - describes that.

If you don’t, you will have duplicate canonical links. This is a clear mistake. Search engines take this into account when ranking.

Open Graph link does not match Canonical link

This error was also triggered by the pagination pages. I have since corrected that. The blog post - Hugo - customized Open Graph integration - still needs to be revised.

Time out when crawling the ahrefs bot

Apparently, my provider’s webspace is sometimes so slow that the ahrefs bot times out on different webpages. The webspace is cheap. I share a server with 50 other customers. Maybe I should look into AWS.

Broken Links Check

The free ahrefs account includes automatic checking of external links. Once a week the website is checked and you receive an e-mail with hints.

Conclusion

So far, I have focused on the technical side of SEO. But a better ranking wouldn’t be bad either. The marketing part of SEO is not really my thing. In any case, I don’t have a guilty conscience when I recommend ahrefs.com.

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