Technical SEO and Indexing

Technical SEO is the work that makes sure search engines can crawl, render and index a website, so that good pages get a fair chance to appear in search. This section is for marketing managers, site owners and developers who have opened Search Console’s Page indexing report and want to know which statuses need action and which can safely be left alone.

Most guides here explain one Search Console status each: what Google’s documentation says it means, when it is a real problem and how to fix it. The audit checklist ties them together.

Where to start

Read them in this order, which follows the path a URL takes from discovery to the index:

1. The technical SEO audit checklist lists the 40 checks we run, from crawl access and indexing to redirects, canonicals, speed and monitoring, and is the best first read if you want the whole picture.

The decisions that come up most often

Is this status a problem at all? Google’s Page indexing report documentation says most sites have at least a few unindexed pages, and that a page marked duplicate or alternate is usually a good thing: it means Google found the canonical version and indexed it. The goal is to get the canonical version of every important page indexed. So the first step is always to sort the example URLs into pages you need in search and pages you don’t, such as feeds, parameter URLs and thin tag archives.

Requesting indexing before changing anything. For “crawled - currently not indexed”, Google’s own wording is that there is no need to resubmit the URL. Asking again for an unchanged page asks Google to make the same decision again. Change the page, its internal links or its canonical signals first, then request indexing for the few URLs that matter most.

Treating a canonical tag as an order. Google’s canonicalization guide calls a canonical preference “a hint, not a rule”, weighed against redirects, sitemaps and internal links. If those signals disagree, Google may pick a different URL. Our rule of thumb from the duplicate-content guide: redirect duplicates that visitors never need, and use a canonical tag only where the duplicate URL has to keep working.

Blaming crawl budget. Google’s crawl budget guide is written primarily for sites with 1 million or more pages, sites with 10,000 or more pages that change daily, and sites with a large share of URLs stuck in “discovered - currently not indexed”. On a site with a few hundred pages, look at server response times, internal links and page quality first.

Fixing in the wrong order. Tuning structured data on pages that robots.txt blocks is wasted effort. The checklist ranks fixes as: anything that blocks crawling or indexing of important pages, then anything that wastes signals (redirect chains, internal links through redirects, duplicates), then how pages are shown in results, then performance unless it is extreme.

In our view, many indexing problems on small sites are really content and internal-linking problems that happen to show up in a technical report. Our own WordPress site was an example: 5 of its 6 blog posts linked to no other page on the site.

If you’d rather have someone run these checks on your site and turn the findings into a prioritized fix list, that is what our technical SEO audits and fixes cover.