GLOSSARY
Search Marketing FAQ
Concise answers to the most common questions relevant to SEO, GEO, CRO, and PPC. Filter by discipline, platform, and topic. Cortex references its corpus of platform-published best practices to draft each answer, with citations linking back to the source documents.
Showing 1945-1947 of 1947 questions
How do robots.txt and noindex tags affect crawling and indexing?SEOIndexingCrawl EfficiencyRobots.txt+
Two distinct controls. robots.txt: prevents crawling (bot doesn't fetch the URL). noindex meta tag: prevents indexing (bot crawls, sees noindex, doesn't include in index). Don't combine: blocking in robots.txt prevents Googlebot from seeing the noindex tag. Use noindex for content you want to exclude from index; robots.txt for content you want to exclude from crawling entirely.
in Site Architecture & Mobile
What server and redirect issues should be checked in an audit?SEOPage Speed / Core Web Vitals+
Six server checks. Server response time (TTFB under 800ms). HTTP status codes (no unexpected 5xx, 4xx). HTTPS implementation (no mixed content). HTTP→HTTPS redirect. www vs non-www canonical choice. Trailing slash consistency. Redirect chains (max 1 hop). Cookie configuration. Server-level issues affect all pages; fix during audits.
in Site Architecture & Mobile
How should technical SEO audit findings be prioritized for fixes?SEO+
Five-priority framework. Blockers (issues preventing indexing - fix immediately). High-impact (issues affecting 100+ important URLs). Medium-impact (issues affecting fewer URLs or less-critical pages). Low-impact (minor optimizations). Documentation/process (preventing recurrence). Use traffic + revenue weighting to prioritize within categories. Don't fix everything - prioritize by impact.
in Site Architecture & Mobile