Low impact · weight 3 · worth up to 0.6 points of the total score
A <meta http-equiv="refresh"> that sends visitors elsewhere is a redirect search engines treat as weaker and slower than a real one, and screen readers and the back button handle it badly. A refresh that only reloads the page throws away whatever the visitor was reading.
Replace the meta refresh with a 301 redirect on the server. If the page reloads itself to show fresh data, update that part with JavaScript instead.
Check a page for this, and the other 70 checks at once
Phone number matches the markup
Local search trusts a business whose name, address and phone agree everywhere they appear. A telephone in the markup that differs from the number the page asks people to call is a contradiction Google has to resolve, and it may resolve it against you.
Site has a reachable XML sitemap
A sitemap is the list of pages a site wants crawled. Without one Google finds pages only by following links, so new or thinly linked pages can take weeks to be discovered.
Search and AI answers may quote the page
nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet tell Google how much of the page it may show. They also govern Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page that forbids snippets is not quoted there either, and a very short max-snippet leaves it little to quote.
Missing pages answer 404
When an address that does not exist answers 200, search engines index error pages as real ones, and a broken link on another site looks like it works. Sending every missing page to the homepage is treated the same way: Google calls it a soft 404. We ask the site for a page that cannot exist and look at the answer.
