Building a product that search can find from the first release.

Google has no guidance on building an MVP, or on deciding what one should contain, so there is no citation for that and we will not invent one. What Google does document is what any new site needs to be found. Google Search Essentials describes technical requirements that it says are few, and notes that meeting them does not mean Google will crawl, index or serve a page. Its key best practices include using the words people would search for in prominent places, and making links crawlable so Google can find other pages.

The SEO Starter Guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled, and that a sitemap is optional. To check whether a new site is in the index at all, it suggests searching with the site: operator, and if nothing appears, going back to the technical requirements. The site move guidance adds a launch trap: some owners block all crawling while a site is in development, and those robots.txt or noindex rules must be removed when the site goes live.

For a founder, the practical point is that indexing, structure and tracking are far easier to set up before launch than after. We build MVPs the way we describe the path for founders: decide what to build and what search demand says about it, build the smallest version that tests the idea, then launch with indexing, structure and tracking in place. Simple projects stay simple, with no six-month agency engagement for something that should ship in weeks.

A tool is often a web application, and that is where Google's JavaScript SEO basics apply. Google can run JavaScript, but a page that depends on it for its content is rendered after it is crawled, links need to be real a elements with an href, and meaningful status codes matter: a 404 for a page that does not exist, or a 401 for a page behind a login. Googlebot also parses the rendered HTML for links, and Google says it is fine to inject links with JavaScript as long as they follow the best practices for crawlable links. Routing that relies on URL fragments is the pattern to avoid, because Googlebot cannot reliably resolve those URLs.

Our own tools show the range. SEO Ops is a WordPress plugin that keeps SEO clients, strategies, tasks, crawl data, reports, approvals and a client portal in one system; it needs WordPress 6.5+ and PHP 8.1+ and runs on your own install. Link Signals is a web tool that reads every outbound link on a website, shows where each one leads today, and flags links that no longer belong. It reads public pages only, and states its limits: it cannot see links behind a login, and links built only while scripts run may be missed.

We cover custom tools as part of Web Development. If you want something like this built, describe it and we will say how we would build it.

A digital product can have a public side that needs to be found, such as a home page, feature pages, documentation or listings, and a private side that does not. Google's guidance applies to the public side. URL structure guidance asks for readable URLs and no URL fragments to change content. Google's canonicalization documentation explains how it clusters duplicate or near-duplicate pages and picks one, which matters whenever the same item is reachable by several URLs.

Mobile matters here as well: Google uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking, and recommends responsive design as the easiest pattern to implement and maintain. Machine-readable information is another part. The structured data introduction says markup gives Google explicit clues about a page, and that it should describe content visible on that page. For content that should not appear in search at all, Search Essentials says to use the appropriate method for controlling how content appears in Google Search.

We build digital products with these decisions made early: logical, stable URLs, semantic templates, content in the HTML and structured data designed with the content model. Because a product is rarely finished at launch, the same thinking carries into later releases, which is covered under ongoing development. Digital products sit alongside websites and ongoing development in our Web Development work.