THE RUBRIC
Search appearance
What the result looks like once you have earned one.
Checks 18 14% of 129
Weight 10% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
Ten per cent because it affects click-through rather than eligibility. It is also the category with the highest proportion of Auto fixes, which makes it the cheapest ground to recover.
What this category covers
- Title presence, uniqueness and length
- Meta description presence and quality
- Open Graph and Twitter card completeness
- Structured data validity, and whether it matches the page
- Breadcrumb markup
- Favicon and site name signals
Representative checks
A sample of what sits in this category, with how each one is decided and who is allowed to fix it. The full list of 129 lives in the product.
| Check | Method | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Title present, unique, and within length Truncation is a smaller problem than duplication across a hundred pages. | Rule | Assist |
| Meta description present and non-empty An empty description is worse than a missing one. It explicitly says there is nothing to say. | Rule | Auto |
| Structured data valid and matching the page Schema that misdescribes the page is a liability, not a bonus. | Rule | Assist |
| Open Graph and Twitter tags complete Governs how the page appears when a human shares it, which is where a lot of early traffic comes from. | Rule | Auto |
What usually goes wrong
- An empty meta description, which is worse than a missing one because it states that there is nothing to say
- Duplicate titles, which arrive in clusters from a single template
- Schema that validates cleanly while describing the wrong page type
- Titles that describe the site rather than the page
When these checks return unmeasured
A check in this category that cannot run is reported as unmeasured and counted in the denominator. It is never rounded up to a pass, which is the difference between a score that bounds its own claim and one that implies it examined everything.
- A page could not be fetched, so its tags cannot be read
- Structured data validation depends on an external service that is unavailable
Where to start
- Export every title, sort alphabetically, and read the duplicates.
- Fill the empty descriptions before writing new ones from scratch.
- Spot-check one page per template for schema type accuracy.