How do I get my website indexed by Google?

Verify the site in Search Console, submit an XML sitemap, make sure nothing blocks crawling, and ensure every page is linked internally from somewhere. Indexing is a quality decision as well as a discovery one — Google fetches far more than it keeps.

What should be in my robots.txt?

Allow everything you want crawled, disallow only genuinely wasteful paths such as internal search results, reference your sitemap, and name the AI crawlers explicitly. Remember it controls crawling, not indexing — disallowing a page does not remove it from search.

How do I check if my site is indexed?

Search site:yourdomain.com for a rough count, then use Search Console URL Inspection for a definitive answer on any specific page. The site: operator is approximate; URL Inspection tells you exactly what Google has, and why.

SEO

Do I need an XML sitemap?

Yes, and it should be generated rather than hand-written. A sitemap helps engines discover URLs they might otherwise miss and signals when pages genuinely changed. It cannot make a thin page rank, and it will not rescue a page nothing links to.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 185 words 3 sections

The rules that decide whether it helps

Canonical URLs only — listing a URL that canonicalises elsewhere sends contradictory signals
Indexable URLs only: no noindex pages, no redirects, no 404s
Honest lastmod. If it changes on every deploy it becomes noise and gets ignored
Split with a sitemap index above 50,000 URLs
Referenced from robots.txt and submitted in both Search Console and Bing

Generate it, never maintain it

A hand-written sitemap is correct on the day it is written and drifts every day after. Generating from routes that actually exist removes missing pages, ghosts of deleted ones and stale timestamps in one step.

changefreq and priority

Google ignores both and has said so for years. They survive in generators because nobody removed them, and a priority column where every page is 0.8 tells you the file was produced by a plugin nobody configured.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, XML sitemaps: useful, misunderstood, and no substitute for links covers it in about 2 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.