SEO Incident Simulator
Free, no signup. Practice a defensible technical SEO investigation with deterministic evidence, plausible decisions, and clear operational consequences. Every run is a hypothetical fixture case—not a live audit or a prediction about your site.
- 1Choose a caseStart with a bundled incident.
- 2Inspect evidenceReview the unlocked fixture records.
- 3DecideChoose the next diagnostic action.
- 4DebriefCarry the method into a real tool.
Migration traffic collapse
A site relaunch is followed by a sharp organic-landing-page decline. Work from the affected URLs outward before changing sitewide settings.
Difficulty: intermediate
What this lab practices
- Establish a launch baseline
- Prioritize lost landing pages
- Flatten redirect chains before measuring recovery
Fixture evidence
Each source is simulated. Review the available records before choosing a next step.
Decision trail (0) decisions made
Select an evidence source
The launch date and landing-page drop line up. What should the incident team do first?
Inspect the available fixture evidence before choosing an action.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you paste is uploaded or stored. Progress may be saved in this browser as scenario and decision IDs only; fixture bodies and visitor input are never stored. Anonymous run-level outcome counters may be used for aggregate research; URLs, domains, IPs, and identifiers are never included, and no statistic is released below 100 runs.
How to use it
- Choose a scenario and read its learning objectives before making a decision.
- Inspect the available fixture evidence instead of guessing from the incident summary.
- Select the smallest safe next action. Consequences unlock evidence, advance the investigation, or end the path.
- At an ending, compare the evidence you found, the corrective action, and the suggested verification tool.
- Restart or rewind to test why another path is weaker. Completion is a training sequence, not a performance score.
Example scenario Fixture data
The guided Canonical conflict and index loss lab inventories five disagreeing signals for a fictional product URL. Its shortest defensible path is:
Find: HTML and HTTP canonicals disagree; navigation points to a redirecting /shop/ URL; the sitemap and redirect agree on /products/.
Fix: use /products/widget-a consistently in HTML and HTTP canonicals, sitemaps, and internal links while preserving the one-hop redirect.
Verify: retest the public signals with the Canonicalization Checker, then use Search Console for Google's selected canonical.
Every URL, date, response, and outcome in that report is invented fixture data.
What the simulation shows
An evidence artifact contains labeled facts and optional rows with a fixture observation date. A consequence explains what a choice establishes or leaves uncertain. An ending separates find, fix, and verify, records missed evidence, and names the shortest diagnostic path. It does not predict traffic recovery, crawling, indexing, or rankings.
How it works
Thirty versioned JSON scenarios define their initial step, evidence artifacts, choices, consequences, unlocked evidence, and endings. The browser-only simulator applies deterministic state transitions, records inspected evidence and decisions, and can save only scenario and decision IDs locally. No live URL, API, model, or Search Console property is queried.
Features
- Guided, intermediate, and advanced technical SEO incidents.
- Evidence spanning headers, redirects, canonical signals, crawl samples, traffic series, rendered HTML, and timelines.
- Rewindable decision paths with explicit operational consequences.
- Find → fix → verify endings linked to the relevant public tool.
Limits of the simulation
- All evidence and outcomes are authored fixtures, not measurements from your site.
- The scenario graph cannot represent every valid investigation sequence or organization constraint.
- Completing a lab does not certify production readiness or prove a fix will work elsewhere.
- Google-only states remain outside public verification and are called out as such.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a diagnosis of my website?
No. Every incident, URL, response, timeline, and outcome is fixture data bundled with the page. The simulator does not fetch your site or use your Search Console data.
Does completing a scenario prove the same fix will work on my site?
No. The labs teach a diagnostic sequence and identify what public evidence can establish. Apply the linked tools and your own evidence before making a production change.
Why does the simulator distinguish public checks from Search Console?
Status codes, headers, redirectsA redirect sends browsers and crawlers from a requested URL to a different one. An HTTP redirect specifically is a 3xx status code paired with a Location header; meta refresh and JavaScript redirects achieve a similar navigation without being a 3xx response themselves. Permanent redirects (301/308) are Google's signal the target should be canonical; temporary ones (302/303/307) aren't., and page markup are observable public evidence. Google’s crawl, selected canonical, and index decisionsStoring a crawled page in the search index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed — Google selects what to keep, and indexing isn't guaranteed. require a verified Search Console property and are not inferred by these fixtures.
Site passport Local context for this saved site
Local data
Saved targets, named lists, and recent check summaries remain only in this browser.
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Common issues & how to fix them
- Errors Canonical signals point to different URLs Fix: Select one preferred URL and align canonical tags, redirects, sitemap entries, and internal links to it.
- Warnings Migration redirects use extra hops Fix: Replace multi-hop migration redirects with one direct 301 from each legacy URL to its final destination.
- Errors Robots policy blocks affected pages Fix: Remove or narrow the production robots.txt rule that blocks pages required for recovery.
- Errors Noindex shipped to production Fix: Remove the production noindex directive and verify it is absent from both raw and rendered HTML.
- Warnings Sitemap and canonical sets drift Fix: Regenerate the sitemap from canonical live URLs and remove stale, redirected, or noncanonical entries.