Working with Issues

Use the unified Issues list to find, prioritize, and dismiss audit findings, internal-link problems, and keyword conflicts across a client site.

Issues gathers everything wrong with a client's site into one list: technical findings from site crawls, internal-link problems, and pages competing for the same keywords. Instead of checking three features separately, you work from a single queue ranked so the pages worth fixing first sit at the top.

The list is page-first. Each row is a page, with the issues found on it. Click any row to open the page drawer and work through its issues one by one.

Where to find it

Open a client and click Issues in the sidebar, directly under Pages.

The list stays empty until at least one crawl has run for the client. If you see No crawl yet., click Run crawl. It takes you to the Page Inventory, where you pick which crawl to run. See Running an Audit.

If a crawl has run and found nothing, you get No open issues. instead, which means the site is clean rather than disconnected.

What feeds the Issues list

Three features report into Issues, each shown under its own source:

Site crawl: technical findings from your latest audit crawl, including missing or duplicate titles and meta descriptions, thin content, redirect chains, slow responses, and missing structured data.
Internal links: link problems detected from your link map, such as pages with no incoming in-content links (nav links don't count), pages that link to the same target more than once, and links pointing at removed pages.
Keywords: keyword cannibalization, meaning two pages on the site ranking for the same non-brand queries in Google Search Console and splitting clicks between them. Requires a connected Search Console property. See Google Search Console.

Note: Only link defects appear here. Linking opportunities (missing links, structural links, and reciprocals) have their own workflow in the Linking Plan and are deliberately kept separate, so "Issues" always means something is wrong.

Severity and priority

Every issue is an Error, Warning, or Info item. Errors are problems that hurt the page now, such as a missing title tag or a link to a removed page. Warnings are worth fixing when you get to them. Info items are usually deliberate choices worth confirming, like a redirect or a noindex tag.

Each row shows the Page, its Top issue (with that issue's category), an Issues count broken out by severity, Clicks · 30d, and Priority.

The list is sorted by Priority, which weighs each page's issue severity against its traffic and key events. A page with one error and real visitors outranks a page with three errors and no traffic, because fixing the first one moves something. The Clicks · 30d column shows the traffic behind that ranking.

The stat cards above the list summarize the site at a glance: Open issues, Errors (with warnings alongside), Pages affected, and Keyword conflicts (counted as page pairs, so one conflict between two pages counts once).

How to filter the list

Type in the Search pages or issues… box to match a page URL, title, or issue name.
Use the source dropdown to narrow to Site crawl, Internal links, or Keywords.
Use the severity dropdown to show Errors only, Warnings only, or Info only.
Click a category chip to narrow to one category, and All to clear it. The chips are Page meta, Content, Indexing, Internal links, Keywords, Performance, and Audit. Only categories that actually occur on the site appear as chips, and the row is hidden entirely when everything falls into a single category.

Filters apply to individual issues, not whole pages: with Errors only active, a page row shows just its errors, and pages with no matching issues drop out of the list.

How to work through a page's issues

Click a page row. The page drawer opens on its Issues tab.
Read each issue's severity, detail, and the guidance line explaining what to do about it.
Use the action link on each issue to jump to the right place: Details opens the crawl finding, and Fix opens Link Mapping for internal-link issues.
For keyword conflicts, the row is labeled Competing with the other page involved. Click Open that page → to inspect the counterpart.

Dismissing an issue

Some findings genuinely don't apply, such as a contact page flagged for thin content, or two pages that intentionally target overlapping queries. Dismissing removes an issue from the list without fixing it.

Open the page drawer and find the issue on the Issues tab.
Click Dismiss.

Dismissed issues stay hidden for that page, including on future crawls, until you restore them. To bring one back, click Show N dismissed at the bottom of the tab, then click Restore next to the issue.

Note: Dismissing a keyword conflict hides it from both pages in the pair, so you only need to dismiss it once.

Rechecking keywords

Keyword conflict detection refreshes nightly. If you've just changed something that affects the report, most commonly a client's brand terms, click Recheck keywords at the top of the Issues page to recompute conflicts now instead of waiting for the next nightly refresh.

Crawl history

Issues shows the current state of the site; it doesn't replace the crawl record. Click Run history in the Issues header to see every past crawl, each run's snapshot, and comparisons between runs. See Audit Reports & History.

Tips

Work top-down rather than by raw issue counts. The Priority order already accounts for which pages have traffic worth protecting.
The Keyword conflicts stat card is the fastest health check after a content restructure: if it climbs, new pages may be stepping on old ones.
Info items are often fine as-is. Confirm a noindex or redirect is deliberate, then dismiss it so the list only shows real work.
Issue counts also appear per page in the Page Inventory, so you can spot problem pages while browsing the full site.

Troubleshooting

The list says "No crawl yet." No crawl has run for this client. Click Run crawl to go to the Pages view, start a crawl there, wait for it to finish, then return to Issues.

No keyword conflicts appear. Conflict detection needs Search Console query data. Check that a property is connected and assigned to this client. See Google Search Console. If the site genuinely has no competing pages, an empty count is good news.

A conflict I fixed is still listed. The keyword report refreshes nightly. Click Recheck keywords to recompute it immediately.

An issue keeps coming back after I fix it. Crawl-based issues clear on the next crawl, not the moment you edit the page. Run a fresh crawl to confirm the fix, or dismiss the issue if it doesn't apply to that page.

Last updated 2026-07-25