# Indexing Best Practices

### Host a Sitemap at Your Site's Root

A sitemap helps us efficiently locate and index your content.

**Best Practices:**

* Create an **XML** sitemap following the [Sitemaps.org protocol](https://www.sitemaps.org/).
* Post the sitemap at your site root (e.g., `https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml`) for easy discovery.
* Verify that your sitemap is publicly accessible by opening it in a browser.
* Ensure your sitemap is referenced in `robots.txt`

### Ensure URLs Are Publicly Accessible

If your site blocks access, we won’t be able to index it.

**Best Practices:**

* Test your URLs in Incognito Mode to ensure they load without login credentials
* Ensure no firewall, VPN, or bot protection is blocking access to our crawler
* Remove `noindex` meta tags from pages that should be indexed

### Avoid Redirect Loops

If a page redirects too many times, we may not be able to follow it.

**Best Practices:**

* Ensure URLs resolve within one or two redirects (e.g., `http → https`, `www → non-www`)
* Avoid redirect loops (`URL A → URL B → URL A`)