🕷️ Crawling & Indexing Guide
Master how search engines discover and store your pages
🔄 How Search Engines Work
Discover
Find URLs via links, sitemaps
Crawl
Fetch page content
Render
Execute JavaScript
Index
Store in database
Rank
Show in results
🤖 robots.txt Configuration
Control what search engines can crawl
Basic Example
User-agent: *
Allow: /
# Block admin areas
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/
# Sitemap location
Sitemap: https://site.com/sitemap.xml
Psilobase Example
Allow: /
# Block utility pages
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /TODO/
Disallow: /scripts/
# Allow CSS/JS for rendering
Allow: /css/
Allow: /js/
📋 Robots.txt Directives
User-agent
Specify which crawler the rules apply to
Disallow
Block crawling of specific paths
Allow
Explicitly allow crawling (overrides Disallow)
Sitemap
Tell crawlers where your sitemap is
Crawl-delay
Slow down crawl rate (not honored by Google)
* (Wildcard)
Match any sequence of characters
🗺️ XML Sitemaps
Sitemap Structure
<urlset xmlns="...">
<url>
<loc>https://site.com/page</loc>
<lastmod>2024-01-15</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Best Practices
- ✅ Keep under 50,000 URLs per sitemap
- ✅ File size under 50MB uncompressed
- ✅ Use sitemap index for large sites
- ✅ Include canonical URLs only
- ✅ Update lastmod when content changes
- ✅ Submit to Google Search Console
- ✅ Don't include noindex pages
- ✅ Use HTTPS URLs if site uses HTTPS
💰 Crawl Budget Optimization
Fast server response
Under 200ms server response time lets Googlebot crawl more pages
Flat site architecture
Important pages within 3 clicks from homepage
Updated XML sitemap
Help Googlebot find new and updated content
Strong internal linking
Pass link equity and help discovery of deep pages
Duplicate content
Wastes crawl budget on identical pages
Broken links (404s)
Wasted crawls on non-existent pages
Redirect chains
Multiple hops waste crawl resources
Infinite URL spaces
Calendar pages, faceted navigation traps
🔧 Crawling Tools
✅ Crawling Checklist
🤖 robots.txt
- robots.txt exists
- No important pages blocked
- CSS/JS allowed
- Sitemap referenced
- Tested in GSC
🗺️ Sitemap
- XML sitemap created
- All pages included
- No noindex pages
- Submitted to GSC
- Updated regularly
📊 Indexing
- No unwanted noindex
- Canonicals correct
- No duplicate content
- Coverage report clean
- 404s fixed