A compact place to check the public crawl surface, the sitemap and robots file, and the Google Search Console workflow used to verify what Google can actually fetch.
Exact Cloudflare rule set:
- Go to Security > Settings and set Security Level to Medium. If Google still sees blocks, drop to Low temporarily while testing.
- Keep Under Attack mode turned Off.
- If the zone uses Bot Fight Mode on a Free plan, turn it Off. Cloudflare documents that Bot Fight Mode cannot be skipped with WAF custom rules, so verified-bot exceptions do not bypass it.
- If the zone uses Super Bot Fight Mode or Bot Management, create a custom rule named Skip verified bots with expression
(cf.bot_management.verified_bot), action Skip, and skip All remaining custom rules plus All Super Bot Fight Mode rules if the UI exposes that phase option. Place it first.
- Optional follow-up rule: create Challenge likely automated with expression
(cf.bot_management.score lt 30 and not cf.bot_management.verified_bot) and action Managed Challenge. Place it after the verified-bot skip rule.
- Check Security > Events after changes to confirm Googlebot is being classified as a verified bot and is not receiving challenges.
Exact Google Search Console sequence:
- Add a new property and choose Domain, using
eaglesperchpress.com with no protocol and no www.
- Verify ownership with a DNS TXT record in Cloudflare.
- Open the property and submit
https://eaglesperchpress.com/sitemap.xml in the Sitemaps report.
- Use URL Inspection on the homepage, directory, book catalog, series index, journals index, one book page, and one long-form notes page.
- Run Test live URL for each target and make sure Google reports that crawl is allowed, fetch is successful, and indexing is allowed.
- If the live test is successful, click Request indexing for the highest-priority URLs.
- After a crawl window, review Page indexing and Sitemaps for coverage, errors, and URLs that still need attention.
Recommended inspection targets: homepage, directory, book catalog, series index, journals index, a book detail page, and one long-form notes page. That combination shows whether Google can reach both the hub pages and the deeper content pages.