Technical SEO
What is indexing.
In short
Storing a page in Google's database after the crawler has fetched and analysed it. Only an indexed page can appear in search results.
Also known as: Google index
Three stages
- Crawling: Googlebot discovers a URL, for example through a link or sitemap, and fetches the page.
- Indexing: Google analyses the content, renders JavaScript, chooses the canonical URL and stores the page in its index.
- Serving: when someone searches, Google picks the best-matching pages from the index.
Why a page may not be indexed
- It has a noindex tag or is blocked in robots.txt.
- Google considers it a duplicate and chose a different canonical.
- The content is too thin or too similar to other pages ('Crawled - currently not indexed').
- Google has not reached it yet because nothing links to it ('Discovered - currently not indexed').
- The server returns errors or the page loads content only through JavaScript.
How to check and speed it up
The Pages report in Search Console shows which URLs are indexed and why others are not. The URL Inspection tool shows details for a specific page and lets you request indexing. Internal links from important pages and an up-to-date sitemap work best, though.
Not everything needs to be indexed
Google does not index every page it knows about, and that is normal. Filters, internal search results and login pages should not be in the index. What matters is that the pages meant to bring traffic get there.