Indexation (Indexing) is the process by which a web page is crawled by a search engine, added to its database, and made eligible to appear in search results.
Indexing steps:
- Discovery: The crawler finds the URL (sitemap, internal link, external link).
- Crawl: The bot downloads the page.
- Render: JavaScript is executed, and the final version of the page is generated.
- Index: The page content is analyzed and added to the index database.
- Serve: It is shown in search results for relevant queries.
Factors that may prevent a page from being indexed:
- Crawl blocked by robots.txt
- noindex meta tag
- Canonical points to another URL
- Low content quality (thin content)
- Duplicate content
- JavaScript rendering error
- Server error (5xx)
Tip: The “Pages” report in Search Console shows the index status of your pages. Pages with the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status are usually held back due to a lack of quality signals; strengthening the content or increasing the number of internal links can help.