Troubleshooting On-Page Grader

If you’re having trouble with your On-Page Grader reports, we’ve outlined a few common issues along with troubleshooting tips below. If you need help getting started with the On-Page Grader tool, please see our overview guide.

Quick Links

• Page Optimization Error
• Common Issues
• I’m Still Having Trouble

If you are attempting to grade a new page in On-Page Grader but are receiving the error:

The URL you entered does not appear to be returning a page successfully. Please make sure that you’ve entered the URL of a valid, working page.

This indicates that the page you want to grade is not accessible to the tool. There are a few things you can check to ensure that the tool is able to access the page as intended.

Attempt to access the URL in your browser

You can quickly test the accessibility of a page by attempting to load the URL in a browser. If the page returns a 404 error or isn’t able to load, our tool won’t be able to access it.

We also recommend testing browser accessibility in an incognito window since admins of a specific site may be able to view a disabled page as “live”, resulting in a different experience than that of a visitor who is not an admin.

Verify that rogerbot is not being blocked from accessing the page

If you have a disallow directive or meta directive in place that is blocking our crawler, rogerbot, we will not be able to access and parse the page for your On-Page Grader report. Additionally, if rogerbot is being blocked on a server level from your site or certain pages on your site, this will keep the tool from being able to access the page.

Below we’ve outlined a few common issues which come up when analyzing On-Page Grader reports with information about how to investigate them.

Missing Title or Description

If you have a title and description on your page but the tool isn’t detecting them, it may be due to the way those elements are formatted.

Our crawler, rogerbot, does not recognize Open Graph tags. OG tags define objects in a social graph for structuring content on Facebook and Twitter. Our crawler recognizes traditional meta tags such as meta name="description". It is considered best practice to have the traditional meta tags on your site even if you already have OG tags.

Optimal Use of Keyword in Header Tags

If you have an H1 tag on your page but you are seeing Optimal Use of Keyword in Header Tags noted under Hurting your score be sure to check the following.

More Than One H1 Present

Be sure there is only one H1 tag present on your page. If you’re not sure, you can right click and select View Source to see the source code for the page you’re grading. Then use the Find functionality to search for H1.

When more than one H1 tag is present, it can cause this flag to be triggered as the tool (and possibly other crawlers) is not able to tell which H1 is the correct one.

H1 Incorrectly Formatted or Hidden in Javascript

Sometimes this flag is triggered because the H1 tag is not properly formatted in the source code of the page. Check to be sure that your tag follows the recommended format.

Additionally, if the H1 is hidden in a block of javascript, our tool may have trouble locating and parsing it. Unfortunately this is a limitation of our crawler.

Keyword Placement is Incorrect

Lastly, if the keyword placement in your H1 does not follow the suggested format (i.e with the keyword towards the beginning of the tag) this can cause the flag to be triggered. If this is the case, be sure to assess if updating that format would be optimal for your specific SEO strategy.

If you’re still having trouble with On-Page Grader, you can email our Help Team at help@moz.com with the following information so they are able to help investigate:

• The login email for your account
• The exact URL and keyword you’re attempting to grade & the keyword you’re testing
• A summary of the issue you’re encountering and/or the error message you’re seeing
• A screenshot of the error or issue, if possible