SEO and GEO6 min read
Nine checks without which your launch quietly costs you search traffic
Technical SEO before a launch means checking robots.txt, the sitemap, canonical, hreflang and redirects before Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console see the new site. The nine checks in this list take a day, while mistakes in them cost months of lost traffic.
1. robots.txt and closed sections
On a staging server the site is usually closed to indexing entirely. Before launch make sure the ban is lifted and only service sections stay closed: admin panel, cart, search results, parameter pages. For Yandex add Clean-param for UTM tags and advertising parameters so duplicates do not enter the index.
Of the nine points, the third fails most often: after launch a page keeps four addresses, and the search engine splits between them what should have gone to one. It shows up in the very first Webmaster duplicates report.
2. A sitemap with real dates
The sitemap should contain only canonical URLs returning 200, each with an honest modification date. The file is referenced in robots.txt and added to Webmaster and Search Console. Pages that do not exist yet and test materials stay out of the sitemap.
3. Canonical and a single URL per page
Each page has one working address: with or without a trailing slash, with or without www, https only. All other variants return a 301 to the main one. Canonical points to itself and matches the sitemap URL. This is the most common reason a new site "does not get indexed" for months: the search engine sees four versions of one page.
4. Language versions and hreflang
With Russian and English versions, each page links to its pair through hreflang, including x-default. Links are mutual: from Russian to English and back. Untranslated pages are not linked to placeholders.
5. Redirects from the old site
When migrating, map the old URLs and set 301 redirects to new pages with the same meaning. Pages without a replacement return 404 or 410, not a redirect to the home page. Check that redirects are single-step: chains of three hops lose weight and slow crawling.
6. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Check LCP, INP and CLS on mobile: WebP images with dimensions and srcset, critical CSS, non-blocking scripts, static caching. Targets: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. Lighthouse lab figures do not replace field data, but before launch there is nothing else.
7. Metadata and structured data
Unique title and description on every page, one H1, Organization, BreadcrumbList and Article or Service markup in JSON-LD. Validate the markup with Google and Yandex tools before launch, not after the first errors in a report.
8. Webmaster, Search Console and Metrika
Verify the site in Yandex Webmaster and Google Search Console, add the sitemap, set the region for a commercial site, connect Metrika and goals. Without this the first weeks after launch pass blind, and nobody sees indexing errors.
9. Notifying search engines and the first crawl
After launch submit URLs through IndexNow, queue key pages for recrawl in Webmaster and use URL inspection in Search Console to confirm pages are reachable and indexable. A week later compare the number of indexed pages with the sitemap: the gap shows where problems remain.
Summary
Nine checks close the mistakes that cost new sites traffic in their first months. If the site is already live without them, the same list works as an audit: go through it top to bottom and fix in order.
Sources
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