By now, you may have encountered SEO dashboards, such as those from Screaming Frog, which sync with Looker Studio. Perhaps you use an enterprise tool to track your technical SEO in the cloud.
That’s all fine, but how helpful is it really?
Is it improving your rankings?
If you’re managing 30-50 or even 100+ sites, does tracking technical SEO with cloud crawlers offer anything actionable?
If you said yes, then great! I’m happy for you.
But if you, like the rest of us, wish there was a better way, there is!
The key is to be more targeted and intentional about what and which pages we track.
This article dives into what is truly essential to track and how to track each. I’ll also cover helpful paid tools for tracking SEO elements. (I’m not affiliated with these companies, but I am a customer of a few.)
Indexability elements
Tracking your site’s indexability is crucial. It should be at the top of your list. If your site isn’t indexable, all your efforts are wasted.
In this section, I’ll explain the key indexability factors that affect your visibility on Google and how to track them.
1. Robots.txt changes
The robots.txt file is the first file that search engines look at when crawling your website. This simple file provides instructions on how bots should crawl a website.
What do we track?
Every SEO should track changes to the robots.txt file, especially if it starts blocking search engines.
Many tools offer this feature, but it’s important to set up email alerts to notify you if the file blocks search engines.
A common reason this happens is when developers push a site from staging to production and accidentally transfer the robots.txt file.
This occurs when all files are pushed live instead of just the updated ones.
What tools to use
While I’m prone to building custom Python tools for tasks, why reinvent the wheel here? Several low-cost tools work great for validating your robots.txt file.
I prefer LittleWarden for this task because it lets you track specific changes or general indexability checks and send email alerts. You can set it to check daily or hourly.
However, Visualping (which I used in this knowledge graph case study) is also an excellent choice for tracking robots.txt changes.
2. Noindex robots tags
Ah, the infamous noindex tag. This is a meta robots tag you can add to pages you don’t want indexed in Google, like login, account or other low-value pages.
If you have pages you absolutely need indexed or not indexed, tracking changes to your configuration is vital to your SEO health.
What tools to use
LittleWarden is great for this because you can customize settings for each page, allowing you to easily set most pages to be indexable while marking a few as noindex.
Tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can also work, but they require more setup.
3. X-Robots-Tag changes
Simply put, the x-robots-tag does the same thing as the noindex meta tag, but instead of being in the <head> of your website, it shows up in the HTTP response headers.
What tools to use
LittleWarden is pre-configured to check your HTTP response headers for any indexability issues that might happen, including canonical tag changes.
4. XML sitemap validation
XML sitemaps are another powerful SEO tool. These files contain a map of all of the links on our sites.
Google uses these as strong hints for pages they should discover and add to their crawl queue.
If your sitemap has errors (e.g., fetch or parse fails), Google will keep attempting to process it for a few days. If the attempts persistently fail, Google will stop trying to crawl the URL.
What tools to use
LittleWarden wins again with its ease of use for tracking changes to your XML sitemaps and ensuring their validity.
5. Canonical tag changes
Canonical tags are an often misunderstood and misused element in SEO.
While Google only treats these as hints and not strict directives (like noindex), it’s still important to track whether they’re changed on a page.