[seanwilson]

> This post is about you and me. Scores indicate the quality of our apps and sites, but we must not trust these numbers thoughtlessly. We have to understand that automatic testing is just a first step.

I run my own scoring tool website best practices and SEO, and often get support requests from users who are worried or annoyed they can't get a perfect score. Some of my general views here:

- Scores serve more as a minimal baseline that your site should meet and there's always limitations to what the score measures. A low score means it's very likely there's some bad issues to fix and a high score means your site is probably in good shape, but this should only be used as a starting point. You can usually trick scoring tools as well so the score is assuming you're playing fair.

- Perfects scores usually aren't possible for non-trivial sites. There's always trade-offs to make, including if it's worth a large development effort to fix something that's not a big deal. Only you can decide what's worth the effort to fix and what your site's audience will care about most.

- Because of the above, it's not usually meaningful to make in-depth comparisons of scores from different sites. Scores are better used as a rough metric to tell if your own site is improving after you make changes.

[Veen]

I had a quick look at your scoring tool. It looks quite useful.

Couple of issues I spotted:

- You're recommending a maximum meta description length of 320. That's no longer what Google recommends.

- I got all green ticks for mobile scaling on a site with "maximum-scale=1". Maximum scale should ideally be avoided.

[seanwilson]

> - You're recommending a maximum meta description length of 320. That's no longer what Google recommends.

Thanks, can you provide a link that gives a length recommendation? On https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-start... they say:

"While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search)"

This one is tricky because the maximum number of characters Google displays is open to change (and there's more search engines than only Google too).

> I got all green ticks for mobile scaling on a site with "maximum-scale=1". Maximum scale should ideally be avoided.

Thanks, I'll look into this. Rule https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/#rule-set-mobile-scaling is only checking for `width=device-width, initial-scale=1` right now (cited from https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo...) and not looking at `maximum-sale`, so this falls under being a decent baseline but still more you could do.

What range of `maximum-scale` should be allowed if any? Off the top of my head, `1.1` is probably just as bad but `100` is probably okay. I'm curious what the typical values used are.

In general, I've been pretty conservative about what rules I've added, sticking to ones that are generally agreed on and generate minimal false positives.

[tentacleuno]

Maximum scaling is really annoying on mobile. Thankfully you can override it in Chromium's accessibility settings menu (I hope they don't remove that!)