Technical SEO is usually called the foundation of SEO. That is true enough, but it does not say what the work is, or when a problem belongs to it. Google’s documentation says more than the label does: it describes how Search works in stages and sets a short list of requirements a page must meet.
This article uses those documents to explain what technical SEO covers, where it stops, and how to tell whether a problem is technical. Where we give our own reading rather than Google’s wording, we say so.
Three stages, and where technical problems sit
Google’s in-depth guide to how Search works says Search has three stages, and that not all pages make it through each one. In crawling, Google finds pages, often by following links from known pages or by reading a submitted sitemap, and Googlebot fetches them. It does not crawl every page it discovers: some are disallowed by the site owner, and others need a login. Google’s crawlers also try not to crawl a site too fast, and read its responses to judge that: HTTP 500 errors mean slow down. The access problems it lists are server problems, network issues and robots.txt rules. During the crawl, Google also renders the page and runs the JavaScript it finds, using a recent version of Chrome.
In indexing, Google analyses the text, title elements, alt attributes, images and video, decides whether the page duplicates another and which version is the canonical, and stores what it learns, along with signals such as the page’s language, the country its content is local to, and its usability. It says indexing is not guaranteed, and names common problems: low-quality content, robots meta rules that disallow indexing, and a design that makes indexing difficult. In serving, Google returns what it judges most relevant to the query.
Our reading: a technical problem is one that stops a page at the first two stages, or stops Google reading it correctly once it arrives.
Google’s three technical requirements
Google’s technical requirements page says it costs nothing to get a page into search results, and that a page is eligible to be indexed if it meets three conditions. Googlebot is not blocked. The page works, meaning Google receives an HTTP 200 status code. And the page has indexable content, in a file type Google supports and not in breach of its spam policies.
On the second condition it says client and server error pages are not indexed, and that the status code can be checked with the URL Inspection tool. It adds that meeting the requirements does not mean a page will be indexed. It points to the Page Indexing and Crawl Stats reports for finding pages Google cannot access, and advises looking at both because each may contain different information about your URLs, and to the URL Inspection tool for a single page. It also notes that a robots.txt block prevents crawling but a URL can still appear in results; to keep a page out, use noindex and allow Google to crawl it.
Where technical SEO ends and the rest of SEO begins
SEO is often split into technical, on-page and off-page work. Google uses “technical requirements” for the minimum a page needs to be eligible, and we found no on-page and off-page split in the pages we read. Our reading: the split is a working convention, and the useful boundary is simpler. Technical SEO is about whether Google can find, read and understand a page. Whether a page that is indexed is then shown for a query depends on relevance and quality, which are content questions.
What the work covers, stage by stage
- Discovery: the links Google can follow and the sitemaps it reads. See our articles on sitemaps and script-built links.
- Crawl access: robots.txt, server errors and crawl budget.
- Rendering: content that depends on JavaScript, including titles, canonicals and status codes on a client-side site.
- Indexing: duplicates and canonical URLs, redirects and site moves, paginated lists and hreflang.
- Understanding: structured data, and images, as in our piece on image SEO.
What technical SEO cannot do
Google says it does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher, and does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve a page even when the page follows its guidelines. Even duplicate handling is Google’s decision: it groups similar pages, selects the one most representative as the canonical, and treats the others as alternates that may be served in other contexts, such as a search from a mobile device. A technically sound page can still be irrelevant or low quality. Technical work removes obstacles. It does not create the reason for a page to be shown.
How to tell whether a problem is technical
Google’s guide says Search Console can report a page as indexed when it does not appear in results, and lists three reasons: the content is irrelevant to the queries, its quality is low, or robots meta rules prevent serving. A routine we would use, as our reading rather than a Google procedure, is three questions about one page. Was it crawled, and with a 200 status? Is it indexed, and as which URL? Is it being shown? The first two are technical. The third often is not. Our beginner guide, how to find which stage of Google Search a page is stuck at, walks through it.
Where this fits at Cultured Digital: technical SEO as an investigation
Our technical SEO page is for sites where the cause is not obvious, and it follows the same path: can it be found, is it allowed and affordable to crawl, is the content really there, which version counts, and is it clear what the page is. The guides cover crawling and indexing, rendering and architecture. We say that a tool export is not an audit: we read the site, form a hypothesis, test it, then write findings in order of impact.