gsc-indexing-diagnosticslisted

# Indexing, crawl, and sitemap diagnostics Search Console's indexing messages are terse and several of them are routinely misread. This skill maps each message to what it actually means and what to do. ## Order of operations Work outside in. Most wasted time in indexing debugging comes from fixing a page when the problem is at the site level. 1. **Site level** — is the property verified, is robots.txt reachable and permissive, is the sitemap being fetched? 2. **Sitemap level** — is it valid, does it contain the URL, is it fresh? 3. **Page level** — `inspect_url_enhanced` on the specific URL. Only step 3 needs the URL inspection tools. Steps 1 and 2 explain most cases. ## Sitemap "Couldn't fetch" The most common and most misdiagnosed message. It means Google's fetch of the sitemap URL did not return a usable response. It does **not** mean the sitemap is malformed — Google never got far enough to parse it. Check in this order: 1. **Fetch it yourself, exactly as submitted.** `curl -sSI https://example.com/sitemap.xml` — confirm `200` and a `Content-Type` of `application/xml` or `text/xml`. An HTML error page served with a 200 is a frequent culprit. 2. **Protocol and host must match the submitted string.** A sitemap submitted as `http://` that 301s to `https://`, or `example.com` redirecting to `www.example.com`, produces this error. Submit the final URL, not the redirecting one. 3. **robots.txt must not block it,** and must itself return 200. A robo