SEO audits by industry · Publishers

Technical SEO audits for news and media publishers

Publisher sites live and die on freshness. A stale news sitemap, a broken NewsArticle JSON-LD payload, or a canonical that points at a redirected category page all cost Top Stories placement within hours. Wrendex audits the editorial archive on a publish-cadence schedule.

All 170+ checks run on every audit · Free audit, no credit card
Sec. IND.01 · What breaks ◊Issues that frequently surface on publisher sites 6 common patterns · from real audits
I.01
News sitemap drifts past the 48-hour window
Google News expects only articles published in the last 48 hours in the news sitemap. CMS bugs frequently leave older articles in or new articles out, and Top Stories surfaces miss the article window entirely.
I.02
NewsArticle JSON-LD missing required fields
Theme updates strip datePublished, dateModified, or author from the structured data. The article still renders, but rich-result eligibility silently disappears.
I.03
Category pages canonicalize to redirected URLs
Section pages (/news/politics, /sports/baseball) end up canonicaling to a redirected URL after a CMS rename. The original category loses its accumulated link equity in one deploy.
I.04
Tag and author archives generate duplicate content
Templated /tag/<x> and /author/<y> pages aggregate the same articles in different orders. Without a noindex strategy, they compete with the canonical article URLs.
I.05
RSS feed stops emitting full content
After a CMS migration the feed renders truncated bodies, breaking syndication partners and re-publishers. The breakage is invisible to anyone not subscribed.
I.06
Article URLs change format mid-archive
Migrating from /YYYY/MM/slug to /section/slug without 301s leaves a multi-year archive returning 404s. Crawl budget collapses on the entire host.
Sec. IND.02 · Catalog checks ◊Wrendex catalog checks that fire on publisher sites 9 checks · 0 linked
C.01 · 404-on-crawled
404-on-crawled
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.02 · soft-404
soft-404
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.03 · 5xx-response
5xx-response
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.04 · canonical-missing
canonical-missing
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.05 · canonical-points-to-4xx
canonical-points-to-4xx
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.06 · title-duplicate
title-duplicate
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.07 · redirect-chain
redirect-chain
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.08 · news-sitemap-stale
News sitemap stale
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
C.09 · newsarticle-jsonld-incomplete
NewsArticle JSON-LD incomplete
Industry-specific check fired during the audit. Detail page in the next catalog refresh.
Sec. IND.03 · Anatomy of an audit ◊What an audit run on a publisher site actually produces 5 steps · first run
  1. Crawl the editorial archive. Wrendex samples articles, section pages, tag and author archives, and the news sitemap on a publish-cadence schedule.
  2. Validate NewsArticle structured data. Every article gets its JSON-LD parsed and the required fields (headline, datePublished, dateModified, author, publisher) verified per the Google News spec.
  3. Detect canonical drift across renames. The audit flags category pages whose canonical now points at a redirected URL, before the index drop hits.
  4. Get PR-ready fix copy. Each finding ships with the exact JSON-LD payload and the precise sitemap-emit rule.
  5. Re-crawl on the next publish. Wrendex re-runs the affected templates within an hour of the next article publishing in that section.
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