Category 1 — HARD GATES: factors that determine whether the new site is crawled, rendered, and indexed AT ALL

Claim: Six hard-gate factors determine whether a page is crawled, rendered, and indexed at all. Fail one and the page does not enter the index — no amount of content quality compensates.

The six gates (each is a separate atomic entry):

1. Reachability / 200 server response — Google hard gate — only 200-status pages are queued for rendering; non-200 (4xx/5xx) may skip rendering entirely.
2. robots.txt not blocking — including JS/CSS — Google hard gate — robots.txt Disallow blocks crawling AND blocks rendering of JS/CSS; "Google Search won't render JavaScript from blocked files or on blocked pages".
3. No accidental noindex — Google hard gate — when Googlebot sees noindex (meta or X-Robots-Tag), it "will drop that page entirely from Google Search results"; stray staging noindex is the most common launch-killer; the most common launch error is a stray staging noindex.
4. Crawlable <a href> links — Google does not follow onclick, <button>, or javascript:void(0) navigation — Google hard gate — Google follows only <a> elements with an href attribute; onclick, <button>, javascript:void(0) navigation is not followed.
5. Critical content not locked behind client-side JS — a conditional gate that bites hardest on new low-authority sites — Google CONDITIONAL gate — critical content locked behind client-side JS gates indexing for new low-authority sites; high-authority sites are largely fine; the bite is concentrated where it hurts most.
6. Mobile version contains the content — mobile IS the indexed version — Content/structured-data/link parity between mobile and desktop is required — limiting links on the mobile version "can slow down discovery of new pages" and parity entries.

Confidence on each individual gate: Verified (Google docs). Grade A.

Source: Google Search Central documentation; compass_artifact research synthesis.

Confidence: High.

Caveat: Gates are binary and unforgiving. They are also cheap to fix if caught pre-launch. The launch checklist is Rule (Stage 0, pre-launch): clear the technical gates or stay invisible — 200, robots.txt not blocking JS/CSS, scan for stray noindex, real <a href> links, SSR/SSG for indexable content, responsive design for mobile parity.