Technical SEO Cheat Sheet
Crawl, index, canonical — in the order search engines apply them
Technical SEO is a pipeline: a page must be crawlable before it can be indexed, and indexable before ranking is even a question. Most problems are one stage failing silently.
Directives
| Directive | Says | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
robots.txt Disallow
|
Do not CRAWL this path | Expecting it to de-index — a blocked URL can still be listed |
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
|
Do not INDEX this page | Blocking the page in robots.txt so the tag is never read |
rel="canonical"
|
This is the preferred version | Every page pointing at the homepage |
301
|
Moved permanently | Chaining several hops instead of pointing at the final URL |
302
|
Moved temporarily | Using it for a permanent move, so equity never transfers |
410
|
Gone, deliberately | Serving 404 for content you intentionally removed |
hreflang
|
This page in another language | Missing the required self-referencing tag |
Audit order
- Can it be crawled? robots.txt, then server response, then internal links pointing at it
- Can it be indexed? No noindex, canonical points at itself, returns 200
- Does it render? If content only appears after JavaScript, confirm it survives rendering
- Is it unique? Near-duplicate pages compete with each other, not with rivals
- Is it fast on a phone? Core Web Vitals are measured on mobile first
- Is the structured data truthful? Marking a page as something it is not gets rich results suppressed site-wide
Frequently asked questions
Why is a page still in the index after I blocked it in robots.txt?
Because Disallow blocks CRAWLING, not indexing. The engine can still list a URL it has never fetched. To remove it, allow the crawl and serve a noindex tag.
Should every page have a canonical tag?
Yes, and it should usually point at itself. The common failure is pointing every page at the homepage, which asks search engines to drop the entire site but one page.
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