Finding SEO Issues on an Author Website: Broken Links, Duplicate Books, and Missing Metadata
Updated: Sep 4
On-page polish for a Wix author site—tuning titles, sharpening descriptions, writing alt text as craft—is a separate job from finding what is actually broken. This article is the diagnostic pass for authorgallant.com: A. J. Gallant’s book pages, series hubs, biography, and articles. It is not another walkthrough of how to phrase a meta description. It is about structural problems that hide books from readers and crawlers: 404s, duplicated targeting, missing metadata, weak internal links, and cover images without accessible text.
Authors accumulate URLs. A book is retitled. A series gains a prequel. A retailer link dies. A “coming soon” event stays live years later. Diagnostics find those mismatches before a reader hits a dead end.
A free SEO audit is a practical starting list: missing descriptions, crawl anomalies, broken internal and external URLs. It does not prove a title will sell, and it does not require inventing traffic numbers.
Structural problems common on author sites
Issue type | How it usually happens | Why it matters |
Broken links | Retailer URL changes, renamed posts | Reader trust drops |
Missing metadata | Fast upload, default Wix template | Snippets show site name only |
Duplicated targeting | Two books share one H1 pattern | Search engines pick one URL |
Unclear headings | Genre slogan replaces book title | Readers cannot tell which book |
Weak internal links | New novel not linked from series hub | Orphan book page |
Cover alt gaps | Image added without description | Accessibility and image search fail |
Stale events | Appearance marked live when past | Misleading biographical info |
These are diagnostic findings—facts about site health—not ranking guarantees.
Repair order that respects the catalogue
Fix access before polish. Suggested sequence for authorgallant.com-style properties:
404s from menu and series hubs — If the navigation promises a book, the URL must resolve.
Unique titles and descriptions on live book URLs — Empty fields are diagnostic red flags; fill them with accurate book names, not keyword spam.
Split overlapping headings — King of the Castle and Dracula Hearts of Stone should not share the same descriptive sentence if they are distinct works.
Cover alt text that names the book — Not “fantasy cover art” alone; the title readers know.
Articles linked to the books they discuss — Blog posts should route inward to relevant series or title pages.
Retailer and external links spot-checked — Audits flag breaks; a human verifies which retailer is still preferred.
Skipping straight to “better adjectives” in a description while series hubs still 404 is optimizing prose on a broken bridge.
What a diagnostic pass includes—and excludes
Includes:
Crawl path from homepage to each series and flagship title.
List of URLs with missing or duplicated title tags.
Broken link report internal to the Wix site.
Images lacking alt attributes on book covers.
Pages competing for the same primary phrase.
Excludes (companion article territory):
How to rewrite an opening paragraph for voice.
Keyword brainstorming for genre fiction.
Fine-tuning alt text style beyond naming the work.
Marketing copy experiments unrelated to structural fixes.
Keeping that boundary clear prevents two URLs from publishing the same advice under different titles.
What software can and cannot see
Rabbit SEO can organize audits, broken-link checks, and page reviews on Wix. It can surface patterns—many images missing alt, several books with identical descriptions.
A human still must confirm:
Series numbering matches publication order.
“Coming soon” labels reflect reality.
Biography dates and event mentions are current.
A retailer link flagged broken should be updated or removed—not blindly restored to a deprecated storefront.
Identifying issues is maintenance. It is not a claim that the site was failing publicly, and it is not a guarantee that fixing metadata will raise rankings for genre terms.
Document findings like an editor, not a score chaser
After a diagnostic pass, produce a short punch list:
URL — finding — owner — done date.
Example rows (illustrative structure only):
`/series/example` — hub links to retired book slug — update menu — pending
`/book/example-two` — duplicate meta description with book one — write unique description — pending
Re-run the audit after fixes. If the same 404 appears six weeks later, the problem was workflow, not tooling.
Goal: a catalogue that matches the shelf
The outcome of diagnostics is accuracy. A reader searching for an A. J. Gallant title should land on a page that names that book, shows the correct cover, links to the series in order, and reaches biography or articles without dead ends. Search snippets should display book names instead of “Home.”
Series hubs versus standalone titles
Series pages carry ordering logic. A diagnostic pass asks: Does book one link forward to book two? Does the hub list only published works? Are prequel or side-novel URLs linked from the series that readers expect, not buried in an old blog category?
Standalone titles need their own metadata and inbound links from biography, articles, and relevant series pages—not duplicate series boilerplate in the description field. When two URLs target the same series phrase in the title tag, the audit should flag cannibalization even if the books are related.
External retailer links as diagnostic items
Author sites often link to retailers. Those URLs rot frequently. An audit list should include external 404s, but repair policy stays human: remove dead stores, replace with current options the author prefers, or link to a general “where to buy” page if one exists on the site. Automated tools report the break; they do not choose the retailer.
When to re-run diagnostics
Run a full structural pass after any of these events: new book launch, series reorder, site menu redesign, migration between Wix templates, or bulk import of backlist titles. Light spot-checks can happen quarterly otherwise. Re-running after every typo fix is unnecessary; re-running after renaming a flagship title is mandatory.
That foundation supports discoverability. It does not promise bestseller rankings or invent audience growth. Fixing structure is what this URL is for; writing better hooks belongs elsewhere.
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