SEO debugging involves identifying and fixing technical, on-page, and off-page issues that prevent a website from achieving optimal search visibility. It focuses on diagnosing crawl errors, indexing problems, ranking drops, and performance bottlenecks to restore and improve SEO health.

Search Engine Land has published a new video, ‘SEO Debugging: Fix Crawl, Index & Ranking Issues Fast’.

The SEL team says, “If your traffic dropped overnight, your first instinct might be to blame a Google penalty or algorithm update. But in most cases, that’s not what happened. Your site didn’t get penalized — it broke. In this video, we walk through a step-by-step SEO debugging checklist based on the SEO debugging pyramid (crawl → render → index → rank → click) to help you quickly diagnose what actually went wrong — without wasting time on random “fixes” that make things worse.”

The video covers the following:

  • Why most traffic drops aren’t penalties
  • The most common crawl, rendering, and indexing failures
  • How to debug SEO issues in the right order
  • Why rewriting content too early is usually a mistake
  • How AI search and modern SERPs make debugging even more critical.

MOZ