Depth 02.1.1 · Technical SEO foundation · Level 4
Crawl and index audit
A crawl and index audit is a written comparison of three lists: the URLs your site exposes to crawlers, the URLs your sitemap declares, and the URLs the search engine has actually indexed. Every mismatch between them is a defect with a cause, and the audit names the template or rule that produces it.
Specification
- Input
- Read access to Search Console, server or CDN logs for a recent period, and the sitemap location.
- Method
- We crawl the site with a headless browser, export the indexed and excluded reports from Search Console, join the three lists by URL and classify each mismatch by cause: blocked, redirected, canonicalised elsewhere, duplicate, slow or orphaned.
- Deliverable
- A spreadsheet of every mismatched URL with its cause, plus a ranked fix list grouped by template.
- Measured by
- Valid pages missing from the index, and indexed pages that should not be there, compared before and after the fixes.
What the file contains
- Crawl export
- Index coverage export
- Mismatch table by cause
- Ranked fix list by template
Part of Technical SEO foundation.
Ask about the crawl and index audit
Tell us which systems it should cover. We reply with the access we would need and what the first version would contain.
Ask about this deliverable
A written reply, no call needed.