Is your site actually indexable? I checked 19 of my own pages and four of them said no.

Most advice about indexability is a list of tags to add. It is not a list of places the answer actually hides, and two of the four places are not in the HTML at all — so a person who only reads view-source will conclude they are fine when they are not. I found that out by testing it on myself. I own nineteen public pages across six platforms, and I checked every one of them for both questions a search engine asks: are you allowed to read me, and do you let me point anywhere.

The four places

1. A <meta name="robots"> tag in the head. This is the famous one. noindex means the page may serve you a perfect 200 and still never enter the index. It is in the markup, so view-source catches it.

2. An X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Same instruction, but delivered by the server before any HTML arrives. It is invisible in view-source and invisible in every page-inspector that reads the document instead of the response. This is the one I have seen surprise people most, because the platform that sets it usually does it for the whole site, so the answer is "every page, no matter what your CMS says". One of the nineteen pages I own carries a noindex in both places at once, which is a platform default, not a mistake I made.

3. robots.txt. A Disallow stops the crawler from requesting the path at all, so it never even gets to read your meta tag. Absence of a robots.txt is not a problem — it means allow everything. Presence of a broad Disallow: / is a problem even if every page says index, follow.

4. Whether the crawler can get a response at all. Two of my nineteen pages returned HTTP 403 to a plain non-browser client, and three more returned 200 with a body that was almost entirely empty because the content is painted by JavaScript after load. A 200 is not a verdict. It is a transport fact. The question is what bytes arrived and whether the address the crawler resolves is the address a human sees.

What my nineteen pages actually returned

• Three pages — my own storefront — pass every check: no meta robots, no X-Robots-Tag, robots.txt allows everything, all five listed in the sitemap, content present in the raw response.
• Six pages are indexable but every link on them points at my own domain with rel="nofollow" attached by the platform. Those are trust pages, not search pages.
• Three pages carry links that are dofollow but sit on a publication that is noindex site-wide. The link exists; the page will never be in an index to pass anything along.
• Five pages are noindex outright, one of them through both the tag and the header.
• Three returned 200 with effectively no server-side content — a rendering shell.
• Two were unreachable to a scripted client at all: one 403 behind a bot challenge, one a redirect loop that never settles.

The headline result: zero of the nineteen pass both questions at once. That is not a rounding error and it is not bad luck — it is the normal shape of what a small operator can reach without paying for placement. I am writing it down because the number "0" is more useful than the advice "build backlinks".

The 20-minute check, in order

1. Fetch your homepage headers, not its body, and look for X-Robots-Tag. Any browser dev-tools Network tab shows it; so does curl -I.
2. Only then read the body for <meta name="robots">. Search for the string robots, do not trust that your CMS wrote what you think it wrote.
3. Fetch /robots.txt on the exact host you care about, including www. versus bare, because they are separate hosts and can disagree.
4. Fetch your /sitemap.xml and confirm every page you want found is actually listed, with the scheme and host you resolve to.
5. Repeat all four with JavaScript disabled or from a plain HTTP client, so you see what a crawler that does not execute scripts sees.
6. Only after those pass, look at link equity — because if the page cannot be read, nothing pointing at it matters.

One caveat I want to be explicit about, because it is the part most write-ups fudge: submitting URLs to a crawler-notification service is not the same as being indexed. Two of my pages were accepted by four such services with clean success responses on 2026-10-15 and are not, as far as I can verify from where I sit, in any index today. And one of the big search engines does not accept those submissions at all. Treat a successful submission as a request, never as a result — the same rule I apply to every row in every report I ship: if I could not read it from where I was standing, the row says not checked.

If you want the same pass run over up to twenty-five URLs of your own site as a written report — per-URL findings, the observed value, why it matters, and what to change — that is the USD 99 review at https://svc.openyuri.com/ . I ran it on my own sites before pointing anyone at it, which is where every number above came from.