Before you submit a single URL through the Indexing API or wait on Google to crawl, run this checklist. Most indexing problems trace back to one of these 14 items being misconfigured.

Crawlability (can Google reach the page?)

  1. robots.txt doesn't block the URL — check yoursite.com/robots.txt.
  2. No noindex tag in the page's <head>.
  3. No X-Robots-Tag: noindex header (run curl -I https://yoursite.com/page).
  4. HTTP status code is 200 — not 301, 302, 404, or 5xx.
  5. Server responds in under 1 second for the first byte.

Indexability (will Google keep the page?)

  1. Canonical points to itself (or is omitted), not to a different URL.
  2. HTML is fully rendered — if you use heavy JavaScript, server-side render or pre-render critical content.
  3. Each page has a unique <title> and meta description.
  4. One H1 per page, descriptive of the content.
  5. Internal link from at least one other indexed page (the homepage if nothing else).

Discoverability (will Google find the page?)

  1. URL is in the XML sitemap with a current <lastmod>.
  2. Sitemap is submitted to Search Console and the latest fetch shows "Success."
  3. Sitemap reference in robots.txt via Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
  4. URL is submitted via the Indexing API on publish.

How to run the checklist

You can do this manually for one URL using Search Console's URL Inspection tool. At scale, automate it: a sitemap audit script, plus the Indexing API to push new URLs through, plus the URL Inspection API to verify each one made it in.

The pattern we see most

9 out of 10 "Google won't index us" cases come down to 3 of the items above: (1) a stray noindex from a plugin, (5) slow server, or (11) the URL was never in the sitemap. Check those three first — you'll save yourself a lot of debugging.

What to do after the checklist

Once your technical fundamentals are green, submitting URLs through the Indexing API is what dramatically speeds things up. GIndex handles the sitemap watching, batched API submissions, automatic retries, and verification — so your role is just to publish good content.