# 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`) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.direqt-search.com/content-indexing/indexing-best-practices.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.