Read it, then pass the check at the end to open step 4.
Mid game: the indexing checklist, developer edition
Updated
Most checklists you have read are the WordPress baseline. MonsterInsights’ nine items are a fair version of it: sitemap, status monitoring, nofollow, noindex, robots.txt, blocking low-quality pages, duplication, and I agree with every item on a WordPress site. Run that list first. Then run what it misses, which is what stalled a site that passed all nine.
One absolute self canonical per page, and reciprocal hreflang when you serve two languages. On clevrstart every page carries rel=canonical to itself, plus hreflang en, fr-CA and x-default, the last pointing at English. Four legal pages did not: they emitted a relative canonical, /privacy, and no hreflang. Found on 2026-10-14, fixed in commit 605cba5, verified live the next day. Nothing in the dashboard pointed at it.
A sitemap that names the address you actually serve. flowingkhaos served every page at /column and /column/, joined by a 307; the sitemap named the slash form, Google held the slashless one, and 21 of 26 pages were filed as duplicates. One URL form everywhere, and a 301 at the edge.
A true lastmod on every entry. On 2026-10-14 only 31 of clevrstart’s 105 sitemap entries carried one. A sitemap with no dates gives Google no reason to think anything changed.
Internal links from pages Google already holds. On 2026-10-15 I crawled the live site: the home page, /tools, /info, /about and /work carried zero links to any service page; only /services linked each one twice, /pricing once, /industries one. That is an orphan graph, and the five pages at the end of it had been “Crawled, not indexed” since August.
Checks to run, one per line:
curl -sI https://your-site/page/ | grep -iE "^HTTP|^location"
curl -s https://your-site/page | grep -o '<link rel="canonical"[^>]*>'
curl -s https://your-site/sitemap.xml | grep -c "<lastmod>"
curl -s https://your-site/ | grep -o 'href="/services/[^"]*"' | sort | uniq -cThe owner’s version, with no curl and in plain words, is seo checklist for new website, which shows the same eight checks as I ran them on 2026-10-14 and what each one found.
Check: every item above has a yes next to it, or a commit. A no with no commit is the next step’s input.
Check what you read in “Mid game: the indexing checklist, developer edition”
Three questions drawn from a larger pool, so no two papers are quite the same. Two right passes it and opens the next step. The questions are public; scoring them needs an account, and the key never leaves the server.
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