Spent $150 on a professional website audit and it saved me from a Google penalty

I paid a local Edmonton SEO guy to go through my site last month and he found 40 broken links and a ton of duplicate content I didn't even know about. If I hadn't fixed those, I bet my rankings would have tanked by now. Has anyone else had a close call with a site audit catching something big?

3 comments

3 Comments

verawhite1mo ago

Read somewhere that Google's John Mueller said they rarely penalize for duplicate content unless it's straight spam. That stuck with me. But broken links are a different story. Those can really mess up your site's credibility with Google. A buddy of mine had 50+ broken links and his traffic dropped 30% before he fixed them. The audit caught stuff you'd never find just poking around yourself.

the_jordan1mo ago

Pushing back a little here. $150 is cheap for peace of mind but acting like a site audit is some kind of magic bullet is overblown. Broken links and duplicate content are real issues but Google isn't quick to slap a penalty on average sites unless you're doing some shady black hat stuff. Most people would catch those problems with a free Screaming Frog crawl or a good sitemap plugin. Honestly feels like people get scared into spending money on stuff they could handle themselves with a little YouTube time.

daniel4741mo ago

40 broken links sounds like you dodged a bullet bigger than my wallet after paying for that audit. My buddy ignored his duplicate content warning and woke up to his site buried on page 14 of Google. Guess sometimes you gotta pay to save your own bacon.