Is Crawlable

Why It Matters

• It is the first step in the search pipeline. Before a page can be indexed and ranked, it must first be crawled. If crawlers cannot access it, everything else — content quality, keywords, backlinks — is irrelevant.
• Accidental blocks are more common than you think. Leftover robots.txt rules from a staging site, a stray noindex tag, or a misconfigured server can block crawlers without anyone noticing for months.
• JavaScript-heavy pages can be partially uncrawlable. If your content only appears after JavaScript executes, crawlers may see an empty or incomplete page. Content that relies entirely on client-side rendering is harder for bots to process.
• Server issues make pages temporarily uncrawlable. If a crawler visits your page and gets a 500 error, a timeout, or an infinitely loading response, it will mark the page as uncrawlable and may not return for a while.

How to Ensure Crawlability

1. Check your robots.txt file. Make sure your robots.txt is not blocking pages you want indexed. Look for Disallow rules that might accidentally cover important sections of your site.
2. Review meta robots tags. Check for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> or nofollow tags on pages that should be indexed. These are sometimes left behind from development or staging environments.
3. Make sure pages return 200 status codes. Important pages should return a 200 status code, not redirects, 404s, or server errors. Use your search console to identify pages with crawl errors.
4. Test with a URL inspection tool. Use your search console's URL inspection feature to see exactly what a crawler sees when it visits your page. This reveals rendering issues, blocked resources, and meta tag problems.
5. Ensure essential resources are not blocked. If your robots.txt blocks CSS or JavaScript files, crawlers may not be able to render your page properly. Allow access to the resources needed for your page to display correctly.

Common Mistakes

• Carrying over staging robots.txt to production. Development and staging sites often block all crawlers with Disallow: /. If this gets deployed to the live site, the entire site becomes invisible to search engines.
• Blocking JavaScript and CSS in robots.txt. Some older configurations block access to JS and CSS files. Modern crawlers need these to render your page. Blocking them means crawlers see a bare, unstyled page or nothing at all.
• Using login walls without realizing it. If accessing your content requires authentication, crawlers cannot get past the login screen. Make sure public content is accessible without any login requirement.
• Never checking crawl error reports. Search consoles provide reports showing which pages could not be crawled and why. Ignoring these means problems go unfixed and pages stay invisible in search results.