When it comes to tech SEO, you’re often required to audit and identify a myriad of technical issues – requiring you to have a wide range of tools in your arsenal. With this in mind here are the top Chrome extensions for tech SEO I regularly use in my day-to-day work.
Robot Exclusion Checker
Controlling and fixing crawling and indexing issues are two of the main pillars of Tech SEO, so any Chrome extensions that can help with this are a must-include in your toolbox.
So what is the Robot Exclusion Checker? It’s a Chrome extension that allows users to check if a website is blocking web crawlers and robots, including search engine bots, from indexing its pages.
| Chrome Extension | Robot Exclusion Checker |
| Rating | 5 Stars |
| Reviews | 25 |
| Users | 20,000+ |
Robot Exclusion Checker Features
As you can see the extension provides you with four different statuses for the page you’re viewing.
The URL status of the page – this will let you know if there is URL change without a HTTP status header (if there was Javascript redirect for example).
The robots.txt status of the page – this will tell you if the page is disallowed or allowed by the site’ robots.txt file. If it is blocked it will highlight the line in the file responsible. Handily it also has a button to view the live robots.txt file.
The meta robots status of the page – this will provide you with info on the meta robots tag on the page, highlighting if directives such as noindex, nofollow have been specified in the tag.
The x-robots status of the page – this will tell you whether an x-robots status header is set in the HTTP header and if it is, what the response is. It will also highlight this for you.
The canonical status of the page – finally you have the canonical status of the page, this will tell you if the page has been canonicalized to another URL, is self-referencing or has no canonical tag set.
As you can see the Robots Exclusion Checker is great for quickly diagnosing if a page has run afoul of a stray robots directive or careless no index tag.
Robot Exclusion Checker Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Great for quickly diagnosing issues that might be impacting the indexability or crawlability of a single URL. | It may not work with all websites, as the extension relies on the website’s “robots.txt” file to be formatted correctly and accessible (though you will have bigger problems with your site to deal with if this is the case). |
| A user-friendly interface that provides easy-to-read visual information for different statuses, such as displaying a green for allowed pages and a red for disallowed pages, making it straightforward to quickly understand the crawlability of a website. | Not suited to testing the indexability/crawlability of a large number of URLs (better to look at Screaming Frog or Sitebulb for this). |
| Completely free, with no limited or paywalled features. |
XPath Helper
Not every extension on this list does something flashy, and XPath helper is probably the least flashy of all of them, but might just be my most used.
XPath Helper as the name suggests, helps you extract, edit, and evaluate XPath queries with ease. It’s fantastic for setting up custom extractions with Screaming Frog or in conjunction with Google Sheets’ IMPORTXML function to quickly extract sitemap URLs.
| Chrome Extension | XPath Helper |
| Rating | 3.5 Stars |
| Reviews | 570 |
| Users | 200,000+ |
XPath Helper Features
When you click the XPath Helper Chrome extension you will be presented with this rather non-descript black drop-down.
By holding shift you and hovering over any element on the page the query field will populate with the full xpath and the results field will populate with the extracted text.
Tip: Letting go of shift will keep the xpath query in place until you hold shift again. This will allow you to edit or copy the query to use elsewhere.
This is much quicker than inspecting the source code with Chrome dev tools and manually copying and pasting the xpath from there.
You can also use the query field to enter your own xpath query and view the results. In instances, like this XPath Helper will highlight the element on the page or in the source code if you have dev tools open.
XPath Helper Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Very easy to use, simply holding shift over an element makes finding the right XPath on any page a breeze. | No option to change the format of the dropdown meaning it can get in the way of elements on the page. |
| Completely free, with no limited or paywalled features. | Doesn’t work with local files. |
Ayima Redirect Path
Redirects are something all tech SEOs deal with on a regular basis. As such, Redirect Path by Ayima is another great extension in your tech SEO toolbox. It makes common tasks like checking for redirect chains or poorly implemented redirects super easy (like 302 being used instead of 301!).
| Chrome Extension | Redirect Path |
| Rating | 4 (and a bit) stars |
| Reviews | 174 |
| Users | 200,000+ |
Redirect Path Features
As an HTTP header and redirect checker, Redirect Path flags your standard HTTP status codes like 301, 302, 404 and 500.
On top of this, the extension flags client-side redirects like meta refresh or redirects implemented with JavaScript (an important one to look out for, as Google recommends handling redirects server side).
With redirects, the extension will show you the starting URL through to the end URL. So if there is a redirect chain, it will display each URL that your browser visited on its way to the destination page.
The icon in the top of your browser will display different status codes as you visit pages with redirects or other HTTP statuses, making it easy to catch any issues as you’re navigating a site.
To illustrate this, here is a redirect chain on B&Qs website.
Tracking each URL in the chain will help you identify problematic redirects or rewrite rules that need to be updated or removed so that the redirect goes directly from the first URL to the final one.
As well as flagging redirects, the extension provides HTTP header info such as server type, server IP and caching headers.
Redirect Path Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Provides detailed information about redirects on a URL | It does cap the number of redirects it displays in a chain to 4. |
| Easy to use interface, with the different status codes appearing on the extension icon when you encounter them. | |
| Super handy copy to clipboard function which lets you quickly grab the redirect info for any page. |
SEO Minion
SEO Minion is the swiss army knife of SEO chrome extensions and if you only install a single extension from this list, make it this one. It is jam packed with different features that will help you with on page optimisation, keyword research, competitor research and of course tech SEO.
I’m only going to cover the features I find the most useful fro tech SEO, but I will definitely be covering the other aspects when I take a look at the best extensions for keyword research and on-page work.
| Chrome Extension | SEO Minion |
| Rating | 5 Stars |
| Reviews | 593 |
| Users | 200,000+ |
SEO Minion Features
The two SEO Minion features I find the most useful for tech SEO are the hreflang checker and broken link checker.
SEO Minion Hreflang Checker
If you’ve worked with international sites, you understand the need to ensure that your site’s hreflang tags are properly implemented.
Of course you could do this manually by inspecting the source code, but it’s easy to miss things and can be incredibly time consuming – especially if there’s issues with missing return tags.
SEO Minion’s hreflang checker takes mere seconds to analyse the page’s hreflang tags. It then displays info on whether the tag is valid, the linked page exists, whether there is return hreflang tag on the linked page and whether an x-default tag exists within the set.
All this information is displayed in an easy to read format with a green yes or red no for each status. On top of that you can quickly download the information as a CSV which is incredibly useful.
Of course if you want to do this at scale then you’re better off using an auditing tool, but still handy for spot checking any issues.
SEO Minion Broken Link Checker
Broken links are the bane of any SEO, providing poor user experience and quite often negatively impacting your site’s organic performance.
Good internal link optimisation is an important part of any site, and key to that is squashing any broken links or redirects.
The tool itself will check all internal links on the page and highlight valid links (green), 404 links (yellow), no domain links (red), empty links (grey), redirects (purple) and server errors (brown). It will also allow you to filter by internal or external links as well as follow or no follow links.
The broken link checker will also highlight these links on the page itself so you can see exactly where they appear on the page. As well as providing a list of all the links by type.
Just like with the hreflang checker you can download the list of links as a CSV.
While really this should be done at scale for most sites, being able to quickly check links at a page level can still be useful for troubleshooting.
SEO Minion Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Both the hreflang checker and broken link tool provide incredibly useful info. | Very minor quibble – would be great if we could copy to clipboard for the hreflang tags and broken links. |
| Great UX and easy to use interface. | |
| Comes with even more useful features for on-page SEO and keyword research. | |
| All this and its free. |
View Rendered Source
The final chrome extension on my list View Rendered Source allows you to view the source code of a webpage after it has been rendered by the browser.
Rendering is a key step in how Google understands pages on your site, so important you diagnose potential problems with how search engines are viewing content on your site.
This is especially important if you’re dealing with JavaScript heavy website (think JS frameworks like React, Angular or Vue).
This is where View Rendered Source steps in, showing you the differences between the source HTML and the rendered version.
| Chrome Extension | View Rendered Source |
| Rating | 4.8 stars |
| Reviews | 25 |
| Users | 20,000+ |
View Rendered Source Features
As far as tools go, View Rendered Source is very straightforward – it will show you the raw HTML, the rendered HTML and the difference between the two, with anything removed during rendering in red and anything added in green.
This makes it very easy to quickly identify any problems such as links or content only appearing after rendering.
You can also fetch the page as mobile or Googlebot. There’s an option to easily copy the code, which is great if you want to forward an issue on to your devs.
View Rendered Source Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Highlighting the differences makes it super easy to understand any changes being made before and after rendering. | The interface is a little bit barebones. |
| Copying the different versions makes it easy to articulate particular issues. |
Best Tech SEO Chrome Extensions Wrap Up
And there you have it. In my opinion the five top chrome extensions for tech SEO. I will be honest, there are plenty of other extensions that do the same or similar jobs, but these are the five I use most regularly.
I will make sure to update if anything new catches my eye, but in the meantime, if you’re looking for more ways to supercharge your day to day work as an SEO, take a look at my guide on mining Reddit for content ideas with python or my beginners guide to Youtube keyword research.