Understanding the Issue Report

1. How to Fix an Issue

Click on any item to open a short description of the issue and step-by-step fix instructions.

2. View Affected Pages

To see which pages are affected by a specific issue, click the number shown in the Pages column.

3. Compare Audit Results Over Time

If you’ve run multiple audits, you can compare their results by selecting a previous audit date from the dropdown at the top of the report. This is how to view historical changes.

Third-party tracking tags or CTAs flagged as 4XX / broken redirects

Marketing and analytics elements embedded in your pages, for example, HubSpot tracking tags or CTA links, can be picked up by the crawler and reported as 4XX errors or broken redirects, even though the pages themselves are live.

These are usually external URLs owned by the third-party tool rather than real problems on your site. Open the affected URLs in the Pages column and confirm whether they belong to a tracking or CTA provider before treating them as errors.

“Mixed content” flagged even though a valid SSL certificate is installed

A valid SSL certificate secures your domain, but a mixed content issue is triggered when an HTTPS page still loads or links to resources over HTTP.

Common causes include internal links or assets hard-coded with http://, resources injected by JavaScript, or missing HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects. Updating those links and resources to HTTPS, or adding the appropriate redirects, clears the flag.

A sitemap is reported as missing when it actually exists

If a sitemap you know exists is reported as not detected, check that it is reachable at the exact URL the audit is configured to use, that it is not blocked by robots.txt or a firewall, and that it is referenced in your robots.txt file.

You can also add the sitemap URL manually in the audit settings.

The crawler starts but doesn’t reach page URLs, for example, on Shopify or JavaScript-heavy sites

If the audit shows site-level metrics but never crawls individual pages, the crawler is likely being blocked or the pages require JavaScript to render.

Try the following:

• Allow the SE Ranking Website Audit bot (SEBot-WA) in your robots.txt file.
• Whitelist the crawler’s IP so a firewall or CDN doesn’t block it.
• Enable JavaScript rendering in the audit settings so client-rendered pages, which are common on Shopify and JavaScript frameworks, can be read.

Why page or issue counts can differ from other crawlers

Different tools use different crawl settings, page limits, rendering behavior, and issue definitions, so the number of pages and issues found in SE Ranking may not match Ahrefs, Semrush, or other crawlers.

A lower page count usually reflects the crawl configuration, including the page limit, crawl scope, robots.txt restrictions, or JavaScript rendering, rather than missing pages on your site.

Confirmation (return) links missing on hreflang pages

This issue is correctly triggered when a page is missing the required return link. For example, page A points to page B using hreflang, but page B doesn’t point back to page A. This breaks the reciprocity search engines require.

The issue can also be triggered when hreflang tags point to a redirected, noindex, or otherwise non-canonical URL instead of the live canonical version.

Because the check requires all language versions of a page to be crawled and verified for return links, false positives can occur when:

• The Maximum number of pages to scan limit is too low.
• The Subdomains setting is disabled when language versions are hosted on subdomains.