ENGINEERING NOTE 46 / 50 · CARD
Keep payment APIs protected while documentation is indexable
A protected API returning 401 to an anonymous crawler is not automatically a defect. Public documentation and private API responses need different indexing and access policies.
Published by OPEN RAMBO. The engineering patterns and pseudocode illustrate designs, not a documented product API. Numerical examples are illustrative.
Identify the affected URL
A search-console alert must be investigated at the exact URL. If it points to a credentialed endpoint, do not remove authentication just to make the warning disappear. Check whether a public documentation page accidentally links crawlers to the private endpoint.
Separate examples and endpoints
Serve explanatory HTML with request examples and safe placeholders at a public route. Keep actual account, product and transaction endpoints under their intended access checks. A documentation example must not contain live credentials or customer data.
Audit discovery paths
A sitemap should list canonical public pages, not authenticated API URLs. Verify public pages return meaningful HTML and private endpoints remain protected. HTTP success alone does not prove a page will be indexed, and an API exclusion is not a site-wide outage.
Illustrative implementation
public_docs = "/docs/payment-workflows/"
private_api = "/api/account/transactions"
# Public HTML: indexable. Private API: authorization required.Acceptance check
Test both routes anonymously. Expect readable documentation and a protected API response, with no secret-bearing URL in the sitemap.