Technical SEO Checklist
This checklist covers the technical foundations that let search engines crawl, render and index a website efficiently. It is written for developers, SEO specialists and students who want a structured way to review a site's infrastructure. Work through it with Google Search Console, a site crawler and your browser's developer tools open. Fix anything that blocks indexing of important pages first, then move on to performance and efficiency improvements.
How to use this checklist
- Crawl the site. Run a full crawl with JavaScript rendering enabled so you can compare raw and rendered HTML.
- Open Search Console reports. Keep the Page indexing, Sitemaps, Crawl stats and Core Web Vitals reports to hand.
- Check each section. Mark each item as pass, fail or not applicable, with example URLs for every failure.
- Hand fixes to developers. Write each fix as a clear ticket with the affected template, expected behaviour and how to test it.
0 of 50 checked
robots.txt and crawl control
XML sitemaps
Canonicals and duplicate URLs
Status codes and redirects
HTTPS and security
International SEO (hreflang)
Rendering and JavaScript
Pagination and faceted navigation
Core Web Vitals and performance
Log files and structured data
Frequently asked questions
Does blocking a page in robots.txt stop it being indexed?
Not reliably. robots.txt controls crawling, so a blocked URL can still be indexed without its content if other pages link to it. Use a noindex directive on a crawlable page to keep it out of the index.
Are 301 and 302 redirects treated differently?
A 301 (or 308) signals a permanent move and strongly suggests the target should be canonical; a 302 (or 307) signals a temporary move. Use permanent redirects for migrations and URL changes.
Does Google use rel="prev" and rel="next"?
No. Google said in 2019 that it no longer uses them for indexing. Paginated pages should instead be linked normally and each have its own self-referencing canonical.
Do I need log file analysis?
It is most useful on large sites, where it shows exactly which URLs search engine bots request and how often. For small sites the Crawl stats report in Search Console is often enough.