I planted 370 SEO defects in a fake 400-page site to test an auditor
Everything below uses a site I generated. These are test results, not results from anyone's real website. The idea A crawl of your own site already holds most of what an SEO metadata audit needs: titles, descriptions, canonicals, language, Markdown (so headings), word counts. Crawling again to check them is a second bill and a second chance to get blocked. So I wrote an Apify Actor that audits…
I crafted a fake 400-page site, designed to test an SEO metadata auditor. The site, generated using a synthetic generator, contained hidden issue codes that the auditor was supposed to identify. Upon crawling the site, the auditor detected 370 issues across 54 distinct rule codes, including 50 errors, 238 warnings, and 82 information messages. The audit reported a site score of 94 (grade A), with 333 pages graded A and 67 graded B.
The auditor proved that the rules functioned correctly, reporting the expected issues and scoring the site accurately. However, it did not validate the auditor's accuracy on real sites, as it was based on the author's own generator, rules, and tests. Real crawls may have structures the author did not anticipate.
In terms of performance, the audit step took about half a second for 10,000 generated pages, and 4.0 seconds in total for 2,000 synthetic pages in the cloud. The slowest part was reading and writing the dataset, not the auditing process itself. The audit tool charges $1.50 per 1,000 pages and provides a prefilled example for testing purposes. If any issues or false flags are encountered while using the tool on a real crawl, the author encourages feedback.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
