Numeral SEO Teardown: 67 Orphaned Pages, 349 Broken Links, and a Content Machine That Needs Maintenance

Crawl data as of February 22, 2026. Analysis powered by redCacti.

Numeral does one thing really well: removing sales tax compliance from the to-do list of ecommerce and SaaS companies. The product handles registration, filing, and remittance across every US state. Customers like Obvi, Muddy Bites, and BoomBoom spend less than five minutes a month on sales tax because of it.

Their website tells a different story. Beneath a technically sound surface sits a content distribution problem: 67 indexed pages with zero incoming internal links, 349 broken external links spread across 83 pages, and a sitewide image alt text rate of 24.9%. The content investment is real - 263 pages, blog posts averaging over 2,000 words each, systematic coverage of all 50 US states and dozens of EU countries. But none of it is properly connected, and a third of it is citing sources that no longer exist.

What We Crawled

Numeral runs across one primary domain:

• numeral.com - 263 pages total, including the main marketing site, a blog with 182 posts, customer case studies, author pages, and competitor comparison pages.

The marketing site is well-structured. The blog is extensive. The problems aren’t architectural - they’re maintenance and internal linking. Both are fixable.

Section 1: 67 Orphaned Indexed Pages - Content That Can’t Be Found

67 pages on numeral.com are indexed, return a 200 OK response, and have zero pages linking to them internally.

These aren’t stub pages or thin content. The orphaned list includes state sales tax guides averaging 2,000+ words, EU VAT compliance guides, SaaS taxability articles by state - content that took real effort to produce. Google can technically find these pages through a sitemap or direct crawl, but no internal link passes equity their way. No navigation points to them. No related posts link across.

The pattern is clearest in two content categories.

State and country guides published in isolation. Numeral has guides for all 50 US states and a growing library of EU country VAT guides. Many of these were published without being linked from a hub page, a category index, or related articles. They exist as standalone documents rather than a connected resource library. A guide to Virginia sales tax and a guide to Maryland sales tax might cover adjacent topics for the same reader - but nothing links between them.

Six customer case studies with zero incoming links. This one is particularly costly. Rejuvia, BoomBoom, Explorer Cold Brew, Amberjack, Luma Nutrition, and Doe Beauty - all have dedicated customer story pages. All six are orphaned. Case studies are high-converting pages. They’re the proof that the product works. Sending a prospect to a customer page and having no other page on the site acknowledge that those pages exist creates a dead end in the content graph.

The fix for most of these pages doesn’t require new content. It requires internal links - from category hubs, from related state guides, from blog posts that reference the same topics.

Takeaway: Internal linking isn’t just about SEO. It’s about telling Google which pages matter. 67 indexed pages receiving no internal endorsement is 67 pages the site has implicitly deprioritized, regardless of intent.

Section 2: 349 Broken External Links Across 83 Pages - Government URLs Rot

Numeral’s blog does something good: it cites primary sources. State tax authority websites, official guidance documents, Department of Revenue portals. That’s the right approach for a compliance product.

The problem is that government websites reorganize constantly, and nobody on the team is monitoring the links after publication.

The crawl found 349 broken external links across 83 source pages. Broken down by error type:

The 153 HTTP 404s are the most actionable. Those URLs are definitively gone. The 129 timeouts are messier - some are government sites that throttle bots, others represent genuinely broken endpoints.

The domain breakdown reveals where the damage is concentrated:

Ohio is the clearest example of what happens when a government domain reorganizes. The Ohio Department of Taxation appears to have restructured their entire URL schema - 42 links across Numeral’s Ohio coverage now return 404. Every citation, every reference to specific FAQs, rate pages, and licensing requirements is now pointing at nothing. The Ohio sales tax guide remains live and indexed, but its sourcing infrastructure is hollow.

The Kansas, Idaho, and Wisconsin revenue sites show a similar pattern at smaller scale. Mississippi’s DOR (dor.ms.gov) may be blocking crawlers entirely, which means those 22 links are either broken or inaccessible - both produce the same reader experience.

There are also 3 links still pointing to numeralhq.com - Numeral’s old domain. Those 404 and should have been updated when the domain migrated.

Benchmark context: For a content operation of this size - 182 blog posts, most citing multiple government sources - some link rot is inevitable. Government URLs are notoriously unstable. The issue isn’t that it happened; it’s the absence of a monitoring process to catch it over time.

Takeaway: A quarterly broken link audit with a tool or script would surface these issues before they compound. The Ohio situation alone represents 42 links that readers may click expecting authoritative sourcing and instead hit a 404.

Section 3: Image Alt Text - 76.9% of Blog Images Are Missing It

Across 182 blog pages, the crawl found 3,223 images. Only 743 of them have alt text. That’s 23.1% coverage - or put differently, roughly 3 in 4 blog images have no alt attribute at all.

Sitewide the picture is similar: 5,628 images across 263 pages, with 24.9% coverage.

This affects two things simultaneously. First, accessibility: screen readers skip images with no alt text. Second, image SEO: Google uses alt text to understand what an image depicts and index it accordingly. At this volume, it’s not a page-by-page problem - it’s a template-level problem. The blog template was likely configured without alt text requirements, and each post published under it inherited the gap.

The good news is that the fix is also template-level. Updating the image component to require alt text going forward stops the bleeding. Retroactive remediation of 2,480 missing alt tags is a larger project but can be batched.

Takeaway: Alt text at this scale needs to be enforced at the CMS or template level rather than relied on as a per-post editorial task.

Section 4: What Numeral Gets Right

This teardown is focused on gaps. Several things genuinely stand out as well-executed.

Schema markup on every indexed page. All 263 indexed pages have structured data present. Not a single indexed page is missing schema. For a site this size, maintaining that baseline is meaningful.

Open Graph and Twitter Card tags throughout. All blog pages have proper OG titles, descriptions, and images configured. Sharing a Numeral article on LinkedIn or X produces a clean preview card. This is not universal across SaaS blogs of this size.

Content depth is real. Blog pages average 2,083 words. Only 2 pages fall below 500 words. This isn’t thin content padded to hit a word count - the state guides and SaaS taxability articles are genuinely substantive, covering rates, nexus rules, filing deadlines, exemptions, and registration requirements. The content investment is serious.

Canonical tags are correctly implemented. Every page carries a canonical pointing to itself. No duplicate content issues from URL parameter variations or alternate versions.

Zero crawl errors on the main domain. Every page returns a 200 OK (with the intentional exception of noindexed pages). The technical foundation is clean.

How Numeral Can Think About Optimization

Quick Wins

• Build a /customers/ index page that links to all six case study pages - this resolves their orphan status and creates a logical destination for prospects
• Audit the 3 remaining numeralhq.com links and update them to numeral.com equivalents
• Fix the 153 HTTP 404 broken external links - these are definitively dead and replaceable with updated government URLs or archived alternatives
• Add internal links between related state guides - Virginia and Maryland, Ohio and Indiana - and from the blog index to orphaned posts

Next Phase

• Establish a quarterly broken link monitoring process; government URLs will continue to change
• Update Ohio guide external citations specifically - 42 broken links make it the highest-priority article for link remediation
• Add alt text to images retroactively, prioritising highest-traffic pages first
• Enforce alt text at the template/CMS level going forward

Final Action Items

• Create topic hub pages for content clusters (a US Sales Tax hub linking to all 50 state guides; an EU VAT hub linking to all country guides)
• Review the SaaS taxability article series for internal cross-linking opportunities - a reader on the Wisconsin page might want to compare with Minnesota or Nebraska
• Develop a /customers/ index that tells the conversion story across all case studies in one place

Key Takeaways

• 67 indexed pages have zero incoming internal links - including 6 customer case study pages that carry significant conversion value
• 349 broken external links across 83 pages, concentrated in state tax authority domains (42 from tax.ohio.gov alone following a site reorganization)
• 76.9% of blog images are missing alt text - a template-level issue affecting all 182 blog pages
• Schema, OG tags, and canonical tags are complete across all indexed pages - the technical foundation is solid
• Blog content averages 2,083 words - the depth is there, but the distribution and maintenance infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the content volume

Numeral has done the expensive part. The content exists, it is substantive, and the technical foundation is clean. What’s missing is the connective tissue - the internal links that let Google (and users) navigate from Numeral’s strongest pages to the full library they’ve built. Most of that connective tissue can be added without writing a single new word.

FAQ

Does Numeral have broken links? Yes. The crawl found 349 broken external links across 83 source pages. The majority are government tax authority URLs that have changed since publication, with tax.ohio.gov accounting for 42 broken links alone following a domain reorganization.

How many pages does Numeral have indexed? 263 pages were crawled, with 9 intentionally noindexed (competitor comparison pages and one VAT page). The blog accounts for 182 of those pages.

What is the orphaned pages issue on Numeral? 67 indexed pages on numeral.com have zero incoming internal links, meaning no other page on the site links to them. This includes numerous state and country tax guides, as well as all six customer case study pages (Rejuvia, BoomBoom, Explorer Cold Brew, Amberjack, Luma Nutrition, and Doe Beauty).

Does Numeral have schema markup? Yes. Every indexed page on numeral.com has schema markup present. Schema coverage is complete across the entire site.

What are the quickest SEO wins for Numeral? The fastest wins are: (1) create a /customers/ index page linking to all six orphaned case study pages, (2) fix the 153 HTTP 404 broken external links, (3) add internal links between related state and country guides, (4) update the 3 remaining numeralhq.com links to the current domain.