Adding a site to Monitor

Putting a site under watch, and making sense of the first crawl.

Adding it

Monitor → add a site → give it the URL you want crawled from, usually your homepage.

Monitor discovers pages by following links from there and by reading your sitemap if you have one. A sitemap is worth having: without it, pages nothing links to are invisible to a crawler, which is itself worth knowing.

Scope

Decide what is in and what is out before the first full crawl, because scope drives both the noise and the cost.

Include the pages that matter — your content, your landing pages, your documentation.
Exclude the ones that will never be interesting: paginated archives running to hundreds of pages, tag pages, search results, anything behind a login.

Excluding is not hiding a problem. A tag archive with a thin-content warning is not a finding, it is the nature of tag archives, and leaving hundreds of them in the report buries the things that are real.

Frequency

More often is not better. The right cadence is roughly how quickly you would want to know:

A marketing site that changes weekly — daily is plenty.
A documentation site under active edit — daily, and it will catch same-day mistakes.
A large site with a slow publishing cycle — weekly on the bulk, more often on the pages that matter.

The first crawl

Treat it as a baseline, not a to-do list. It will surface things that have been true for years and are not urgent, and it has nothing to compare against yet.

Read it once to spot anything genuinely alarming — a page returning the wrong status, a noindex you did not know about — then let the second crawl do the real work. From then on you are looking at changes, which is where the signal is.

Who gets told

Set the alert recipients when you add the site. See alerts and incidents — one problem is one alert however many pages it touches, which is the part that decides whether the alerts stay readable.