Most technical SEO audits miss the stuff that actually keeps your pages out of the index. Here are five issues I keep finding that standard tools don't flag.
1. Soft 404s disguised as 200s
Your server returns 200 OK, but the page says "No results found" or "Product unavailable." Google treats these as soft 404s. I found 12,000 of these on an ecommerce site last month. They were crawling them weekly and indexing nothing.
2. Redirect chains exceeding five hops
Google follows redirects, but each hop costs crawl budget and dilutes signal. One publishing site had chains going through seven redirects because of incremental migrations. Cut them down to one hop maximum. Their indexation rate jumped 34% in six weeks.
3. Canonical tags pointing to noindexed pages
Someone puts a noindex on the canonical target. Now Google ignores both pages. Happens more than you'd think after site restructures. Cross-reference your canonical URLs against your noindex directives monthly.
4. Inconsistent hreflang creating duplicate clusters
If your hreflang annotations don't form complete relationship clusters, Google might index multiple versions or none. Check that every URL in a language set points to all the others including itself.
5. Lazy-loaded content below the fold that Googlebot never triggers
Your infinite scroll or "load more" button requires user interaction. Googlebot doesn't click buttons. Those products or articles don't exist to Google. Implement pagination or ensure content loads on initial render.
Check these five things before running another comprehensive audit. You'll probably find something blocking hundreds or thousands of pages from getting indexed.