SEO Guide
Technical SEO
Make your pages crawlable, indexable, and fast.
Technical SEO is the foundation: everything that decides whether search engines can crawl, render, and index your pages at all. Get it wrong and no amount of content or links will help.
Below is every technical topic that matters, in plain English — with the IndexerNow tool, fix, or guide that handles it. Where we don't have a tool for something yet, we say so instead of pretending otherwise.
Crawl & indexation
Serving every page over valid HTTPS is a baseline ranking and trust signal — mixed content or an expired certificate quietly costs you.
Search engines can only rank pages they can reach. robots.txt tells crawlers which paths they may fetch — a single stray Disallow can hide your whole site.
Being crawlable isn't the same as being indexable. A noindex directive or X-Robots-Tag header keeps a page out of the index even when it's perfectly reachable.
When several URLs show the same content, the rel=canonical tag tells Google which one to index — a wrong canonical is a common reason good pages never rank.
301s pass signals to the new URL; long redirect chains and HTTPS→HTTP hops leak crawl budget and confuse indexing.
A sitemap is your machine-readable list of URLs worth crawling. Keeping it clean and current is the cheapest discovery signal you have.
On large sites Google only fetches so many URLs per visit. Wasting it on low-value pages leaves your important ones uncrawled.
'Discovered', 'Crawled – currently not indexed', 'Indexed' — each state means something different. Read the real verdict per URL instead of guessing.
Rendering, media & international
Schema.org JSON-LD describes your page to search engines and unlocks rich results. Validate what you have and generate what's missing.
Multi-language sites need hreflang so Google serves the right locale — missing self-references and non-reciprocal tags are the usual failure.
LCP, INP, and CLS measure real-world experience and feed ranking. Audit them per page and fix the worst offenders first.
Google indexes the mobile version of your pages. If content or links are missing on mobile, they effectively don't exist.
A page that returns 200 but reads as 'not found' gets dropped as a soft 404. Return a real 404 or 410 for missing pages.
If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, crawlers may miss it. Server-side rendering or prerendering makes it reliably indexable.
Compressed, correctly sized images (WebP, lazy loading) speed up pages and let your images rank in Google Images.
Getting the right pages crawled
A backlink passes no value until Google crawls the page it lives on. Push those linking URLs so the link actually counts.
Large catalogs churn constantly. Get new and seasonal product and category URLs crawled fast so they earn traffic while they're relevant.
Know the limits
Reading server logs shows exactly what Googlebot fetched and how often — the ground truth for crawl behaviour. IndexerNow tracks AI-bot hits, but not Googlebot log analysis yet.
Education only — no dedicated IndexerNow tool for this yet.
Filters and paginated lists can spawn thousands of near-duplicate URLs that drain crawl budget. Control them with robots rules, canonicals, and parameter handling.
Education only — no dedicated IndexerNow tool for this yet.
Frequently asked
What's the difference between crawlability and indexability?
Crawlability is whether a search engine can fetch a page; indexability is whether it's allowed to store and rank it. A page can be crawlable but carry a noindex — reachable, yet deliberately kept out of the index.
Can I submit URLs for a site I don't own?
No. Google and Bing only accept indexing requests for properties you've verified, so you can only push URLs on domains you control. You can still audit or inspect any public URL with the free tools.
Will fixing technical issues get my page indexed?
It removes the blockers, but indexing is still Google's decision. Clear the technical problems, submit the URL for a crawl, then confirm with a status check the next day.