SEO Crawling Checklist for Azure - In a Nutshell

When configuring your Azure environment, it's essential to consider these key factors to ensure your setup doesn't inadvertently impede search engine bots. These considerations will enhance your website's visibility in search engine results while also improving overall performance and user accessibility.

Your Search (SEO, AI SEO, GEO, etc) performance and infrastructure are deeply linked. When your website is hosted on Microsoft Azure, every configuration choice, from firewalls to caching rules, can affect whether Google and Bing can crawl your content effectively.

Coming up to Halloween, we thought it would be useful to create this guide so that your team don't have any spooky issues that make your search rankings disappear.

Misconfigurations don’t always cause visible errors, but they can silently and quickly harm your SEO by slowing down bots, blocking access, or serving inconsistent versions of your site.

In a nutshell, this checklist walks you through seven critical areas where Azure settings impact search crawling and how to ensure you are correctly set up before your visibility disappears 👻.

1. Access & Networking

Search engines can only rank what they can reach. If Azure networking or firewall settings restrict access, Googlebot and Bingbot will fail to crawl your site, leaving entire sections unindexed. Think about the issues that can arise when this happens - it's best to avoid them - the time and relationship consequences are huge. 

• Public access - Ensure your website is publicly reachable without requiring a VPN or private endpoint. If bots can’t reach the server, your pages will never appear in search results.
• IP restrictions - Check Azure Web App firewalls, Network Security Groups (NSGs) and Application Gateways. Overly strict IP blocking can prevent genuine crawler access, cutting off search engines entirely. Your team need to test this until it's configured properly.
• Geo-filtering - Avoid region-based access controls that might block data centres where crawlers originate. If Googlebot’s IPs are rejected, it treats the site as offline and stops trying.
  

2. Security & Authentication

Security layers are essential, but when misapplied, they can make a website invisible. Many Azure environments accidentally require authentication or mismanage SSL redirects, turning a public site into one that bots can’t access.

• No forced login - Don’t redirect unauthenticated users or bots to Azure AD login pages. Crawlers can’t log in, so they’ll drop your pages.
• Correct HTTPS setup - Certificates must be valid, and the redirect chain between HTTP and HTTPS must be clean. Redirect loops or expired certificates lead bots to treat your site as broken. You would be surprised by how often companies forget to renew certificates. Our ArekiboCare service makes sure this never happens.
• Balanced rate-limiting - Configure Azure’s DDoS or WAF protections to distinguish between genuine crawl activity and malicious hits. Excessive throttling can make crawlers assume your site is unstable.

3. Performance & Availability

Search engines allocate a finite crawl budget*. Slow or unreliable servers waste that budget, meaning less of your content gets indexed.

• Fast response times - Aim for consistent load times and use Google Lighthouse and GTmetrics. Slow responses make bots deprioritise your site, leading them to revisit it less often. Your customers won't tolerate a slow site either.
• Auto-scaling - Consider enabling Azure App Service auto-scaling to handle both user and crawler traffic spikes. If Azure resources max out, crawlers may record errors instead of valid pages. 
• Error-free uptime - Eliminate recurring 500 errors or broken connections in App Services, APIs or Functions. Frequent server errors make crawlers view your domain as unreliable, reducing crawl frequency.

* Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will crawl and index from your website within a specific timeframe. It's determined by two factors: crawl rate (how many pages the search engine can crawl per day) and crawl demand (how many pages the search engine wants to crawl). SEMrush's article - Crawl Budget: What Is It and Why Is It Important for SEO? is worth the read. 

4. Crawling & Indexing Signals

Search engines rely on clear directives to decide what to crawl and what to ignore. Incorrect robots files, duplicate URLs or metadata misfires can undo all your optimisation work.

• robots.txt - Make sure /robots.txt is accessible and correctly configured. A single misplaced “Disallow” can block your entire site. Our technical SEO services help your team throughout
• Sitemaps - Submit accurate sitemaps through both robots.txt and Search Console. Incomplete or outdated maps cause crawlers to miss new pages. We recommend regularly submitting your updated sitemaps to the Google or Bing tools. Your CMS/DXP platformshave features to reindex your sitemap.
• Meta tags & headers - Review global headers added by Azure Front Door or your CDN. A misapplied noindex header or tag can de-index critical pages across the site.
• Canonical tags - Always define preferred URLs, especially if you use multiple endpoints (e.g., azurewebsites.net) or staging environments. Without proper canonicals, duplicate pages compete for ranking, resulting in crawl issues.

5. Content Delivery & CDN

How you deliver your content affects how search engines experience it. Azure CDN and Front Door can dramatically improve performance, but they can also unintentionally serve outdated, cached versions to crawlers.

• Cache freshness - Configure caching rules so search engines always get the latest content. If bots index stale versions, search results will display old data even after updates.
• Compression & optimisation - Enable compression and minify assets. Faster delivery enhances crawl efficiency and improves rankings tied to Core Web Vitals.
• Mobile-first - Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing.
  

6. Testing & Monitoring

Your SEO health depends on ongoing visibility checks. Without testing, it’s easy to miss slow degradation or subtle blocking issues. The Google and Bing tools are very useful, and there are others you can use, such as Screaming Frog

• Search Console Tools - Use the URL Inspection tools to see exactly what search engines can access. They’ll flag crawl errors, redirect loops, or blocked resources. You need to plan for these and collaborate with your Infrastructure and DevOps team to resolve them.
• Server logs - Review Azure diagnostic logs to confirm bots receive 200 OK responses. If you spot frequent 403s or 500s, your configuration may be silently blocking crawlers. Remember this isn't a blame game, 'we' just need to learn from these issues and incorporate the learnings into our practices. 
• Test the URL - Simulate crawler access using Google’s and Bing’s console tools. If content differs from what users see, your security layers, caching rules or CDN headers need to be reviewed.
  
  

7. Verified Google & Bing Crawlers

Not every visitor claiming to be a bot is genuine. Some scrapers mimic Googlebot to bypass security. You need to verify bot identity to protect performance and prevent you from blocking legitimate crawlers.

• Verify via DNS - Googlebot hostnames should resolve to googlebot.com or google.com, and Bingbot to search.msn.com. Reverse DNS checks confirm authenticity and prevent fake crawlers from consuming bandwidth.
• Avoid User-Agent only validation - User-Agent strings are easily faked. Always perform both reverse and forward DNS lookups to confirm the source.
• Optional IP lists - Google and Bing publish official IP ranges for organisations that need static allowlists, but DNS remains more reliable since IP ranges change frequently.

That’s a wrap…

Technical SEO starts with accessibility — when Azure settings are misconfigured, your content may still exist — but, as far as Google or Bing is concerned, you’re not being indexed. Remember, this is a process you need to keep on top of, monitor often and react quickly to fix.

By optimising networking, authentication, performance and delivery while verifying genuine crawlers, you ensure your website remains fully discoverable. In SEO, visibility is earned not only through content but also through configuration, and setting up Azure properly plays a decisive role in your results. Minor details that could be overlooked can have significant consequences

..and remember to:

• Build guardrails - Create a checklist with your infrastructure team and review each item in the Azure Portal to ensure everything is as it should be. Meet with the team to review progress and work together to build awareness across the wider team and your customer teams.
• Regularly test - Revisit performance and DNS settings, and test crawl behaviour using Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools . Remember that as your infrastructure evolves or your team grows, settings can change without considering SEO implications.
• Build into your process - Remember that search engines don't necessarily index your website as quickly as you would like, and data can lag, so an issue could persist for weeks before you know about it. Integrate regular reviews into your SEO audit process.
  

Get in touch if we can be of help 👻