Technical SEO

Indexing

Indexing is a search engine's decision to store a crawled page and make it eligible to appear in results. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, whatever its quality.

From above black and white cabinet drawer with assorted repair tools in craftsmanship, illustrating the SEO definition of Indexing
Indexing is a search engine's decision to store a crawled page and make it eligible to appear in results. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, whatever its quality.Photo: Erik Mclean / Pexels

Google indexes selectively. "Crawled — currently not indexed" and "Discovered — currently not indexed" are the two statuses that matter most in Search Console, and both usually mean the same thing: the engine did not consider the page worth the storage. Near-duplicate templates, thin category pages and auto-generated variants are the usual population.

Because indexability outranks every other lever — no index, no ranking, no traffic, no revenue — it deserves the first hour of any audit. Check coverage by template rather than site-wide: an aggregate of 85 % indexed can hide a product template at 20 %, which is where the money was.

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