SEO hygiene: helpful content checks, indexing control, canonicals and Search Console
For marketing coordinators, content specialists and web editors who publish and maintain pages, and for IT staff who look after the website. Complete 'Basic SEO concepts that don't change every month' first: it covers helpful content, titles, descriptions and internal links in outline. This course goes further using Google Search Central and Search Console documentation: checking a page against Google's helpful-content questions, keeping a page out of search correctly (robots.txt is not the tool for that), choosing canonical signals and redirects for duplicate and moved pages, reading Search Console's Page indexing reasons and URL Inspection, and spotting title, page-experience and spam-policy problems in an audit. Google's documentation changes; check it before major site work. Your organization decides who may change robots.txt, redirects and templates.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- About 100 minutes
- Contents
- 5 lessons · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 10 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Evaluate a page against Google's helpful-content questions, including who created it, how and why
- Choose between robots.txt, noindex and login protection to keep a page out of search results
- Choose the right canonical signal and redirect type for duplicate, moved and removed pages
- Interpret Search Console Page indexing reasons and URL Inspection results to decide whether a page needs fixing
- Identify title, page-experience and spam-policy problems in a page audit
Course outline
- 1.Evaluating a page against Google's helpful-content questions: who, how and whyLesson · 18 min
- 2.Choosing between robots.txt, noindex and login protection to keep a page out of searchLesson · 16 min
- 3.Choosing canonical signals and redirect types for duplicate, moved and removed pagesLesson · 18 min
- 4.Interpreting Search Console Page indexing reasons and URL Inspection resultsLesson · 16 min
- 5.Identifying title, page-experience and spam-policy problems in a page auditLesson · 14 min
- 6.SEO hygiene: helpful content checks, indexing control, canonicals and Search Console: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 14 questions
- 7.SEO hygiene: helpful content checks, indexing control, canonicals and Search Console: practical exerciseKnowledge check · 1 question
- 8.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Google Search Central: Robots.txt introduction and guide
- Google Search Central: Block search indexing with noindex
- Google Search Central: How to specify a canonical with rel="canonical" and other methods
- Google Search Central: What is a sitemap
- Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search
- Google Crawling Infrastructure: How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers
- Search Console Help: Page indexing report
- Search Console Help: URL Inspection tool
- Google Search Central: Influencing title links in Google Search
- Google Search Central: Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results
- Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search
See it with your own jobs and topics
Tell us about your team and we'll walk you through setup, from choosing jobs to your first skills check.