Technical SEO: crawling, indexing & site health

Search engines must be able to reach a page, be allowed to fetch it, be able to render it, and judge it worth storing. Each is a separate failure point.

The most valuable diagnostic is Search Console's page indexing report, which tells you exactly which pages are indexed and, for those that are not, why. 'Discovered – currently not indexed' usually signals a quality or crawl-budget issue; 'Crawled – currently not indexed' usually signals Google judged the page not worth storing; 'Blocked by robots.txt' is self-inflicted and fixable in a minute.

An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want indexed and is a hint, not a command. It matters most on large sites, new sites with few external links, and sites with pages that are poorly interlinked.

Keep it accurate: include only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs. A sitemap full of redirects, 404s and noindexed pages wastes crawl budget and reduces trust in the file. Submit it in Search Console and reference it in robots.txt.

Use lastmod dates honestly. Bumping every URL's lastmod on every deploy tells search engines nothing and trains them to ignore the signal.

Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. That has a blunt implication: content that exists only on your desktop layout effectively does not exist.

Responsive design solves this cleanly, because there is one HTML for all devices. If you serve different markup to mobile, verify that the mobile version has the same content, headings, structured data and metadata as the desktop one.

In Nepal this is not a technicality. The audience is overwhelmingly mobile and frequently on a constrained connection, so a heavy page is a genuine business problem before it is an SEO one.

Serve everything over HTTPS, and make sure exactly one version of your site resolves. A site reachable at http, https, www and non-www is four sites as far as crawlers are concerned, splitting signal four ways.

Page experience, including Core Web Vitals, is part of how Google assesses pages. The three metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (loading), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability).

Speed is not a tie-breaker to be optimised last on a Nepali site — it is a primary concern, because the median user is on mobile data. A page that takes eight seconds on a slow connection loses most of its visitors before it is judged by anything else.

Core Web Vitals has its own guide in this series with the thresholds and specific fixes.

Structured data is technically optional and practically important: it tells engines what your content means, powers rich results, and is increasingly how AI answer engines extract facts reliably.

Implement in JSON-LD, use types that genuinely describe the page, and make sure the markup reflects content visible to users — Google's guidelines require this and violations can earn a manual action. Validate with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

Technical SEO is mostly maintenance after setup. Check these on a schedule rather than after a traffic collapse.

Changing domain, URL structure or platform is where sites lose traffic permanently, and almost always for avoidable reasons.

The essentials: map every old URL to its new equivalent and 301-redirect it; keep the redirects in place indefinitely rather than for a few months; retain the content, titles and structured data of pages that were performing; update internal links to point at final URLs rather than relying on redirects; submit the new sitemap and keep the old property in Search Console.

Then watch indexing and impressions daily for a few weeks. A migration that has gone wrong shows up in Search Console long before it shows up in revenue.