## **🔍 What Is the Pruning Report?**

The **Pruning Report** is a section inside Site Audit that lists every page on your site alongside the SEO issues detected on it. Its purpose is to help you decide which pages are worth keeping, improving, or removing from your site entirely.

Each page in the report is evaluated against a set of SEO criteria. A page is counted as **healthy** only when all detected issues on that page have been either resolved or deliberately marked as ignored. Until that happens, the page remains in an unresolved state and does not contribute to your healthy pages score.

## **📊 Why Your Healthy Pages Score Shows Zero**

The healthy pages metric reflects the percentage of crawled pages that have no outstanding issues. If your score is sitting at zero — or very close to it — one of the following is usually the cause:

- **All crawled pages have at least one unresolved issue.** Even a single low-priority issue on every page is enough to keep the score at zero.
- **The crawl has only just completed.** Scores are calculated after the crawl finishes processing. Give the platform a few minutes to update the dashboard after a fresh crawl.
- **No issues have been reviewed yet.** The pruning report requires you to take action — resolve or ignore — before pages are marked healthy.

A zero score does not automatically mean your site has severe technical problems. It most commonly means the review workflow has not been started yet.

## **✅ How Resolving or Ignoring Issues Affects Your Score**

Every page moves through a simple lifecycle inside the pruning report:

1. **Crawled** — the page has been discovered and scanned.
2. **Issues detected** — one or more SEO problems are flagged on the page.
3. **Reviewed** — you either fix the issue on your site and mark it resolved, or you decide the issue does not apply and mark it ignored.
4. **Healthy** — once every issue on a page is either resolved or ignored, the page is counted as healthy and your score improves.

This means **ignoring an issue is a completely valid action** and counts toward your score just as much as fixing it. Ignoring does not hide a real problem — it tells the platform that you have reviewed the issue and made a conscious decision that it does not need to be addressed.

## **⚖️ When to Resolve vs. When to Ignore an Issue**

Use the guidance below to decide the right action for each flagged issue:

- **Resolve the issue** when it is a genuine problem that could harm rankings, user experience, or crawlability — for example, a broken internal link, a missing meta description on an important landing page, or a page with duplicate title tags.
- **Ignore the issue** when it does not apply to your site's context — for example, a "thin content" warning on a deliberately short utility page, a missing canonical on a page you intentionally left without one, or a redirect flag on a page that is correctly redirecting.
- **Ignore in bulk** when the same issue type appears across many pages that share the same intentional structure — for instance, paginated archive pages or tag pages that are expected to have limited unique content.

When in doubt, prioritise resolving issues on your highest-traffic and highest-priority pages first, then use ignore to clear lower-priority flags across the rest of your site.

## **🗂️ Recommended Workflow When Issue Counts Are High**

If your crawl has surfaced a large number of issues, working through them systematically will move your healthy pages score in the right direction without feeling overwhelming.

1. **Filter by issue severity.** Start with critical and high-severity issues. These have the most impact on rankings and user experience and should be resolved before moving to warnings or notices.
2. **Group by issue type.** Fixing one issue type across all affected pages at once is faster than reviewing page by page. For example, address all missing H1 tags in one pass before moving to the next issue category.
3. **Bulk-ignore low-priority issue types.** After reviewing a category, if the issues are not relevant to your site, use the bulk ignore option to clear them all at once and immediately raise your healthy pages count.
4. **Re-crawl after making fixes.** Once you have made technical changes on your site, trigger a new crawl so the platform can verify the issues are resolved and update the healthy pages score accordingly.
5. **Review the pruning report regularly.** Aim to keep the number of unreviewed pages low. A consistent review habit prevents the score from drifting back to zero after future crawls.

## **💡 Quick Tips**

- Your healthy pages score will not update in real time as you click resolve or ignore — allow a short processing window after taking bulk actions.
- Pages added since the last crawl will not appear until you run a new crawl.
- Ignoring an issue only affects the platform's reporting — it does not change anything on your live website.

## **🆘 Need More Help?**

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.