🕷️ Crawling & Indexing Guide

Master how search engines discover and store your pages

🔄 How Search Engines Work

1

Discover

Find URLs via links, sitemaps

2

Crawl

Fetch page content

3

Render

Execute JavaScript

4

Index

Store in database

5

Rank

Show in results

🤖 robots.txt Configuration

Control what search engines can crawl

Basic Example

# Allow all crawlers
User-agent: *
Allow: /

# Block admin areas
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/

# Sitemap location
Sitemap: https://site.com/sitemap.xml

Psilobase Example

User-agent: *
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

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow

Block crawling of specific paths

Disallow: /private/

Allow

Explicitly allow crawling (overrides Disallow)

Allow: /public/

Sitemap

Tell crawlers where your sitemap is

Sitemap: /sitemap.xml

Crawl-delay

Slow down crawl rate (not honored by Google)

Crawl-delay: 10

* (Wildcard)

Match any sequence of characters

Disallow: /*.pdf$

🗺️ XML Sitemaps

Sitemap Structure

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<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

🏷️ Meta Robots Tags

Directive Crawling Indexing Use Case
index, follow ✅ Allowed ✅ Allowed Default - all pages
noindex, follow ✅ Allowed ❌ Blocked Thank you pages, internal search
index, nofollow ❌ Links not followed ✅ Allowed User-generated content pages
noindex, nofollow ❌ Blocked ❌ Blocked Admin, staging pages
noarchive ✅ Allowed ✅ Allowed No cached version shown
nosnippet ✅ Allowed ✅ Allowed No description in SERPs

🔧 Crawling Tools

🔍

Google Search Console

Coverage reports, indexing issues, sitemap submission

Access →
🕷️

Screaming Frog

Desktop crawler for technical SEO audits

Download →
🤖

robots.txt Tester

Test your robots.txt in Search Console

In GSC →
📋

Sitemap Validator

Validate XML sitemap format

Validate →

✅ 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