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 140+ checks run on every audit. Free audit, no credit card.

Issues that frequently surface on publisher sites

6 common patterns from real audits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wrendex catalog checks that fire on publisher sites

9 checks, 4 linked. Linked checks open the full catalog entry: what it is, why it matters, how to fix it. The rest are industry-specific checks fired during the audit; their detail pages arrive in the next catalog refresh.

• 404-on-crawled (detail page coming)
• soft-404 (detail page coming)
• 5xx-response (detail page coming)
• canonical-missing
• canonical-points-to-4xx
• title-duplicate
• redirect-chain
• News sitemap stale (detail page coming)
• NewsArticle JSON-LD incomplete (detail page coming)

What an audit run on a publisher site actually produces

5 steps on the 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 on the first audit after the next article publishes in that section.

Keep reading

• SEO audits for e-commerce stores
  Common technical-SEO patterns we surface on e-commerce stores, plus the catalog checks that fire.
• SEO audits for marketplaces
  Common technical-SEO patterns we surface on marketplaces, plus the catalog checks that fire.
• SEO audits for SaaS sites
  Common technical-SEO patterns we surface on SaaS sites, plus the catalog checks that fire.

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All 140+ checks, free audit, no credit card.