SEO Indexability Audit: Robots, Noindex & Canonical Evidence

Audit an explicit list of public URLs for common static technical indexing obstacles. Get the observed HTTP status, redirect chain, robots.txt crawl permission, applicable meta and HTTP robots directives, canonical declarations, and specific issues in structured JSON.

This is a focused preflight for SEO consultants, migration teams, content operations and developers. It is not a Google index checker, a complete SEO score, a site discovery crawler or a rendered-browser audit.

Pricing

$0.50 per 1,000 eligible URL analyses. $0.005 per run. Standard-run platform usage is included. Only successful eligible rows in the default dataset trigger the result charge. Error, not-found, skipped and robots-denied diagnostics do not trigger a result charge. The run fee, where listed, still applies to empty or failed runs. Memory is limited to 256–512 MB. Set a maximum run cost in Apify; inspect the actual dataset and run charge breakdown after an interruption. Input item limits bound work and do not replace the run spending limit.

What makes the output useful

• Separate “search crawler disallowed” from “noindex detected.” Robots.txt blocking does not prove a page is absent from an index.
• Keep the evidence behind each issue: raw meta directives, X-Robots-Tag values, canonical declarations and redirect hops.
• Report conflicting directives and multiple canonical targets without pretending to know which canonical a search engine selected.
• Distinguish a fetched empty/non-HTML response from an upstream failure. Failed requests never become a clean audit.
• Export qualifying fetched audits to the dataset and preserve all other diagnostics in the key-value store.

Input example

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com/"],
  "maxItems": 20,
  "searchBot": "googlebot",
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 15,
  "failOnFetchError": true
}

Field	Behavior
urls	1–200 explicit public HTTP(S) URLs. Fragments removed and exact normalized duplicates removed. No URL discovery.
maxItems	Global maximum of 1–200 unique URLs; default 20. Excess URLs are recorded as truncation.
searchBot	googlebot or bingbot; default Googlebot. Changes the directives evaluated, not the request user agent.
requestTimeoutSecs	3–30 seconds for each DNS resolution and each HTTP request; default 15. A redirect chain can involve several requests.
failOnFetchError	Default true: any fetch error makes the run fail, retaining completed rows and summary. False permits partial runs; zero completed audits always fail.

Unknown inputs fail validation rather than being silently ignored.

Output and interpretation

The default dataset contains only fetched audits with HTTP 200, nonnull evidence, and both robots.crawlerAllowed and robots.searchBotAllowed equal to true. Useful noindex, canonical-review and non-HTML HTTP diagnostics remain eligible when those conditions hold. .actor/output_schema.json links the dataset, RUN_DIAGNOSTICS and RUN_SUMMARY in the default key-value store. The item JSON Schema is dataset-item.schema.json; the Console table is defined in .actor/dataset_schema.json.

Main fields:

• inputUrl, finalUrl, observedAt, httpStatus, redirects.
• assessment: the leading diagnosis, listed below.
• robots: availability and status of robots.txt, crawl permissions for this Actor and the selected search crawler, matching rule line where available, and declared crawl delay.
• evidence: content type, title, raw relevant meta/HTTP directives, combined applicable directives, canonical targets and static meta refresh declarations.
• issues: issue code, severity and a concrete explanation. Multiple issues may coexist even when the main assessment shows only one.
• renderedJavaScript: false and googleIndexStatus: "not_checked" make the scope explicit.

Assessment	Meaning
no_static_blocker_found	No supported static blocker found in a 200 HTML response. Not proof of indexing or full indexability.
noindex_detected	Applicable static meta or HTTP noindex directive observed.
search_crawl_disallowed	Robots.txt restricts the selected search crawler. This is a crawl restriction, not a reliable index-exclusion method.
http_status_issue	Final resource did not return HTTP 200.
review_required	Canonical or meta-refresh evidence needs review.
non_html_requires_review	HTTP evidence inspected; non-HTML content may still be indexable.
not_fetched_robots_disallowed	This Actor's crawler is disallowed. The page was not fetched and page-level evidence is null.

RUN_DIAGNOSTICS.rows preserves the complete non-200, skipped and robots-denied audit rows without adding them to the default dataset. RUN_DIAGNOSTICS.failures preserves thrown audit failures; these also appear in RUN_SUMMARY.failures. A robots-denied diagnostic row is a completed permission check, not a completed HTML fetch. RUN_SUMMARY.audited counts all completed audit rows, datasetRowsSubmitted counts qualifying rows handed to resolved SDK push calls, not verified saved rows or charged events, and diagnosticRows counts excluded rows. Diagnostic-only runs can succeed with an empty dataset. The JavaScript synthetic-event push returns no saved/charged count, so a spending-limit or storage interruption requires inspection of the actual dataset and run charge breakdown. Diagnostics are checkpointed as they are produced, so an unrelated later storage failure does not discard earlier saved diagnostics. The existing failOnFetchError behavior still applies to thrown audit failures. Canonical URLs are never fetched. No messages, alerts or schedules are created by this Actor; use your own Apify task scheduling and integrations.

Boundaries and responsible operation

Only use URLs you are permitted to audit. Public accessibility is not a grant of redistribution rights. This Actor never logs in, submits forms, follows canonical targets, executes JavaScript, accepts cookies, bypasses access controls or uses proxy rotation.

• Requests use TechnicalDostIndexabilityBot/1.0, not a spoofed Googlebot.
• Robots.txt is checked before each page/redirect destination. 404/410 allow crawling; unavailable/error/HTML robots responses fail closed. Cross-origin robots redirects are held for review.
• Declared crawler delays up to 30 seconds are respected. Higher delays stop that URL. Otherwise a minimum one-second delay precedes each page request. Processing is sequential.
• No retry on 401, 403, 407, 429 or server errors. No attempts to evade blocks.
• DNS responses are checked and pinned per request; any private/special-use address rejects the target. Only standard HTTP(S) ports and credential-free URLs are accepted.
• Maximum five page redirects, five same-origin robots redirects, 512,000 robots bytes and 2,000,000 page bytes. Compressed responses despite the identity request are rejected.
• Only static UTF-8 HTML and HTTP metadata are inspected. HTTP Link canonical relations use exact relation tokens; links declaring a different anchor context are ignored. No rendering, canonical-target verification, sitemap membership, Search Console, live Google index status, soft-404 detection, hreflang validation, mobile rendering or Core Web Vitals.
• Complex or nonstandard directives may require manual review. No arbitrary SEO score, ranking prediction or guaranteed indexability claim is produced.

Source references

• Google robots meta and HTTP specifications
• Apify output schema
• Apify dataset schema validation

This product is independent of Google, Bing and the audited websites.