Search analytics and insights training - content auditor

The reading grade chart reports on the reading grade level of pages in the index. The reading grade is assessed using the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale. This estimates the reading level required to understand the content from the user’s point of view. The grade level is the level of schooling - a grade of 8 corresponds to an 8th grade reading level, or that easily understood by a 13-14 year old in 8th grade.

A reading grade level of 8-9 is considered plain English. For WCAG 2.0 accessibility compliance (Level AAA) the readability of your sites content should be secondary school level (grade 9) or lower. The pages audited for the chart above pass this AAA check.

Clicking on any of the bars in this report filters the recommendations data based upon that reading grade level. For example by clicking on the grade 5 level we get an analysis of that specific grade.

The missing metadata table identifies pages that are missing metadata fields that are configured for reporting within the content auditor.

By default the content auditor reports on author, format, language, publisher and subject metadata.

Clicking one of the items filters the report to report on only items missing the selected field.

For the search in the example above the default tags are missing in all pages. An additional metadata field, tags, is also reported on and this is missing from 3581 pages on the site.

The duplicate titles table lists titles that are found in more than one page. A duplicate title could indicate a duplicate content page, or a poorly titled page.

Duplicate titles should be avoided as these can cause confusion with users.

This table can be used to identify the pages with duplicate titles so that a web administrator can take the appropriate action (which could be removing duplicate content or re-titling a page to provide better context.

Clicking one of the items filters the report to report on only items that contain the selected title. Clicking the view all button opens up the attributes report.

The date modified report presents a chart of when pages / documents were last modified. This is based upon the metadata of the page/document and can be helpful to identify which documents should be updated and/or reviewed.

Moving your mouse across each of the bars in the chart, will give you a glimpse of how many pages / documents have changed in a certain timeframe. Clicking on a bar filters the report to the selected year.

The response time report provides you with a bar chart of the time taken to download documents. This may help identify pages / documents / sections or entire sites where response time is in need of improvement.

Note: the response time only tracks the time taken to retrieve the document and doesn’t include linked resources. It is not the same as a page load time which includes the time taken to load these resources (such as images presented in a HTML page).

Hovering over the bars in the chart provides additional information.

The undesirable text table reports on undesirable words found within the content.

By default, the undesirable word list includes common misspellings but can be customised to identify organisational-specific undesirable words (such as specific words banned in editorial policies or other terms such as acronyms).

Clicking one of the items filters the report to report on only items that contain the specific word. Clicking the view all button opens up the attributes report.

The duplicate content report shows documents for which the content (or if configured, some metadata) is duplicated by other documents. Duplicated content makes site more difficult to navigate, and may also be penalized as a ranking factor by some search engines.