Indexing

Indexing is a search engine deciding to keep a page it has crawled, and storing it so it can be returned for a search. A page can be crawled and still not indexed, usually because the engine judged it thin, duplicated, or not worth storing.

Crawled but not indexed

This is the common and confusing case. The engine visited, read the page, and chose not to keep it. Usual causes:

  • The page is near-identical to another one on your site.
  • There is very little on it that is not navigation and boilerplate.
  • It is a filtered or sorted variant of a page that already exists.
  • The engine has decided the site’s overall quality does not justify storing more of it.

Only the first three are worth fixing directly. The fourth is fixed by making the rest of the site better, slowly.

Getting a page reconsidered

Publish the change, make sure the page is linked from somewhere that gets crawled often, and submit it. Then wait. Re-submitting the same unchanged page repeatedly does nothing.

Related terms

Crawling

Crawling is how search engines read your website: a program visits each page, follows the links, and records what it finds. If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot rank. Digger crawls your site the same way, which is how problems are found before they cost you visitors.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to describe how a page feels to use: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to input, and how much the layout moves while loading. They are a ranking signal, and a small one.