Glossary / Indexing
What is Indexing?
Indexing is when a search engine stores your page in its database so it can appear in results. Crawled and indexed are not the same thing.
Two steps happen before you can rank. A bot crawls the page, meaning it fetches and reads it. Then the search engine decides whether the page is worth keeping. Plenty of crawled pages never make it into the index.
Check any page in Google Search Console. It will tell you whether the address is indexed and, when it is not, give a reason: discovered but not crawled, crawled but not indexed, blocked, or treated as a duplicate.
Thin and near-identical pages get left out most often. The fix is rarely technical. Make the page worth storing, or retire it and point the address at one that is.
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