A website being online does not mean search engines understand it
As developers, we usually think:
If my website is deployed and users can access it, the job is done.
But after building content-heavy websites, I realized there is another layer that developers often overlook:
How do search engines discover, crawl, and understand my website?
After deployment, many invisible problems can appear:
- Are pages returning the correct HTTP status codes?
- Is the sitemap valid?
- Are URLs structured correctly?
- Are there unexpected 404 pages?
- Are search engines still crawling the website?
- Which URLs are indexed and which are not?
These problems usually do not appear during local development.
They only appear after your website is live.
The problem I experienced
While building my own content website, I encountered unexpected indexing issues.
At first, everything seemed fine.
The website was running.
The pages were accessible.
The application worked.
However, search engine crawling behavior changed after some deployment and website structure changes.
Lesson 1: Infrastructure stability affects search engine crawling
The website was initially deployed on Cloudflare Workers.
Because of runtime limitations, some requests occasionally resulted in 5xx errors.
For normal users, an occasional failure may only be a small inconvenience.
But for search engines, repeated failures can affect how they evaluate a website.
A website that frequently fails to respond correctly is harder for search engines to crawl reliably.
Eventually, I noticed that search engine crawling activity decreased significantly.
This made me realize:
Website reliability is not only a user experience problem. It is also a search engine visibility problem.
Lesson 2: URL changes are more dangerous than they look
Later, I changed parts of my URL structure to make it cleaner and more SEO-friendly.
However, changing URLs is not just a simple string replacement.
It affects:
- redirects
- sitemap generation
- URL discovery
- indexing status
- search engine understanding
Without proper monitoring, it is difficult to know whether these changes are helping or hurting.
SEO starts before keywords
When people talk about SEO, they often think about:
- keyword research
- ranking optimization
- backlinks
- content strategy
These are important.
But for developers, there is a more fundamental question:
Can search engines correctly access and understand my website?
Before optimizing keywords, we should make sure:
- pages are accessible
- URLs can be discovered
- technical SEO issues are detected
- website structure is healthy
Building IndexFlow
This experience led me to build IndexFlow-core.
IndexFlow-core is an open-source search engine indexing infrastructure designed for developers.
The goal is not to replace SEO professionals.
Instead, it focuses on the technical foundation between websites and search engines.
Current focus areas:
- Sitemap management
- URL discovery
- SEO quality checks
- Indexing workflow management
- Search engine submission infrastructure
GitHub:
https://github.com/IndexFlowing/IndexFlow-core
Website:
Why Rust?
I wanted IndexFlow to be:
- lightweight
- self-hostable
- reliable
- suitable for long-running services
Rust fits this kind of infrastructure project very well.
During development, I also extracted some reusable components into standalone Rust libraries.
The idea is simple:
If a component can be useful outside IndexFlow, it should not be locked inside the project.
Open-source direction
IndexFlow-core is moving toward an open-source search engine indexing infrastructure.
The long-term vision is to provide developers with better tools for managing the relationship between their websites and search engines.
Future improvements include:
- better SEO quality gates
- smarter URL scheduling
- multi-site management
- improved indexing monitoring
Final thoughts
IndexFlow was not created because I wanted to build another SEO tool.
It started because I encountered a real problem while building websites.
Deployment issues, URL changes, and indexing problems made me realize:
Search engine visibility also needs infrastructure.
That is why I started building IndexFlow.
If you are interested in technical SEO, Rust, or open-source infrastructure, I would love to hear your feedback.
Thanks for reading.
