How indexing works#
- Discovery: Google finds the URL through links or sitemaps.
- Crawling: Googlebot fetches the page.
- Rendering: Google runs JavaScript to see the page as a browser would.
- Indexing: Google analyses content, picks a canonical URL and decides whether to store it.
- Serving: indexed pages become eligible to rank for queries.
How to check whether a page is indexed#
- URL Inspection in Search Console — the definitive answer for a single URL.
- Pages report (Indexing → Pages) — indexed vs not indexed, with reasons.
- A
site:search gives a rough view but isn’t complete or exact.
Why Google doesn’t index some pages#
| Reason | Fix |
|---|---|
| noindex tag or header | Remove it if the page should rank |
| Blocked by robots.txt | Allow crawling |
| Duplicate / canonicalised elsewhere | Consolidate or differentiate content |
| Low quality or thin | Improve, merge or remove |
| Not enough internal links | Link from relevant, strong pages |
Not everything should be indexed Tag archives, internal search results, thank-you pages and thin author pages usually add no search value. Fewer, better indexed pages generally beat a bloated index.
Related: crawl budget, thin content, technical SEO checklist.