Technical SEO Examples: Six Real Fixes

Abstract SEO advice is easy to nod along with and hard to act on. These are concrete technical SEO examples — the actual before-and-after of common problems, taken from real implementations including this site.

Example 1: The redirect that wasn't

Problem: A site moved from http://www.example.com to https://example.com but left all four variations resolving independently.

A provider who has never broken anything has probably never audited anything closely enough to break it.

FROM THE WRITE-UP OF FOUR MISTAKES ON THIS SITE

Effect: Ranking signals split four ways. Google picked one version arbitrarily; internal links pointed at another.

Fix: 301 redirect all variations to one canonical version, add self-referencing canonical tags, update every internal link to the canonical form.

Example 2: Content that only existed after JavaScript ran

Problem: A services page rendered its content client-side. View Source showed an almost empty HTML shell.

Effect: Delayed indexing, and non-Google crawlers — including several AI systems — saw nothing at all.

Fix: Serve the critical content and navigation links in the initial HTML response. This site avoids the problem entirely by being static HTML with no rendering dependency.

Example 3: Duplicate structured data across two URLs

Problem: Identical FAQPage schema on both the homepage and a dedicated FAQ page.

Effect: Search Console reported the FAQ page as "Crawled – currently not indexed." Google treated it as redundant.

Fix: Remove the schema from the homepage so it exists on exactly one URL, and expand the FAQ page with substantive unique content. This is a real example from this site.

Example 4: One unescaped quotation mark

Problem: A page title containing quote marks was dropped into a JSON-LD block without escaping, breaking the JSON syntax.

Effect: Invalid structured data on that page. Google emailed a warning; the markup was unreadable.

Fix: Escape or remove the quotes, then validate with the Rich Results Test. Also a real example from this site.

Example 5: Mobile navigation hidden with display:none

Problem: Responsive CSS hid the nav links on narrow screens without providing a menu to replace them.

Effect: Mobile visitors could reach the homepage and nothing else. Since Google uses mobile-first indexing, this is also an internal linking problem, not just a usability one.

Fix: A proper toggle menu keeping all links present in the HTML. Also from this site — found and fixed after launch.

Example 6: Titles that looked fine and weren't

Problem: Titles under the 60-character guideline still truncating in search results.

Effect: The end of each title cut off with an ellipsis, losing the brand name.

Fix: Measure pixel width, not character count. Capitals, em dashes, and ampersands are wide. Roughly 580 pixels is the practical ceiling.

Four of the six above were mistakes on this site, found and documented rather than quietly fixed. The full process: how to audit your own site.