Indexing
indexed / search index / page indexing / in the index
Indexing is a search engine storing information about your page in its database so the page can be found later. Cloudflare compares it to a library card catalog. Google is direct about the limit: indexing is not guaranteed, and a page can be indexed and still never appear.
Start with what the thing is, because the word sounds more mysterious than the object. Cloudflare's description is the plainest one available: search indexing is like creating a library card catalog for the Internet so that a search engine knows where to retrieve information when a person searches for it. It can also be compared to the index in the back of a book, which lists all the places in the book where a certain topic or phrase is mentioned. An index is a lookup table. Nothing about it decides who wins.
What goes into that table is narrower than most people assume. Cloudflare says indexing focuses mostly on the text that appears on the page, and on the metadata about the page that users do not see. Google describes the same stage from inside: after a page is crawled, this stage is called indexing, and it includes processing and analyzing the textual content and key content tags and attributes. The collected information about the canonical page and its cluster may be stored in the Google index, a large database hosted on thousands of computers.
Read that word may, because the next sentence in Google's guide makes it explicit. Indexing is not guaranteed, and not every page that Google processes will be indexed. Google adds that indexing also depends on the content of the page and its metadata, and lists the design of the website as something that can make indexing difficult. So being live, being fetched, and being stored are three separate events, and the third is a judgment somebody else makes about your page.
Then the sentence that should change how you read every progress update. Google states that Search Console might tell you that a page is indexed, but you do not see it in search results, and gives three reasons: the content on the page is irrelevant to users' queries, the quality of the content is low, or robots meta rules prevent serving. Indexed is a claim about storage. It is not a claim about whether anybody will ever find the page.
In practice
A report says the new pages are indexed and everybody treats that as the result. It is a true statement about a database, and it answers a smaller question than the one you asked. The question you asked was whether the pages bring anyone in. Ask which searches those pages actually appear for, because Google has published the case where the first answer is yes and the second is no.
Not the same as
- Ranking
- Indexing decides what exists to be chosen from. Ranking decides the order among what was chosen. Google describes a third case where a page clears indexing and still is not served.
- A copy of your website
- The index stores information about the page, chiefly its text and the metadata readers never see. It is a record of what your page is about, not the page itself.
Why it matters to you
Indexed is the word that gets reached for when somebody is asked whether the work is showing results, and it is usually true and almost never the answer. The platform's own documentation supplies the counter-example in one sentence, which makes it a rare case where a follow-up question has a published authority behind it.
What to ask or check
- 01Which searches do these pages appear for, rather than simply whether they are indexed?
- 02If a page is reported as indexed and still does not appear, which of Google's three reasons applies?
- 03Is anything in the page settings telling search engines not to show it?
What people get wrong
That indexed means findable. Google states that Search Console might tell you a page is indexed while you do not see it in search results, and names relevance, content quality and robots meta rules as the reasons.
Red flags
- A count of indexed pages offered as the result of the work.
- Anyone promising that pages will be indexed, when Google says indexing is not guaranteed.
- No distinction drawn between a page being indexed and a page being found.
Who owns it
The search engine decides what goes into its index and what comes out of it. What your pages say, and whether anything on them blocks serving, is yours.
Where you will see it
In the page indexing report in Search Console, and in any progress update that counts pages instead of searches.