Indexability describes whether a search engine can add a page to its index. A page can be crawlable yet not indexable, for example when it carries a noindex tag, points its canonical elsewhere, or returns an error.
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What blocks indexing
- A noindex directive in the meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header
- A canonical tag pointing to a different URL
- Error or redirect status codes
- Content too thin or duplicated for the engine to keep
Checking a page
Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to see the indexing state, the canonical Google chose and any reason a page was left out.
Common mistakes
Leaving noindex on after a launch
Staging settings carried to production quietly remove pages from search.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Crawlable means a bot can fetch it. Indexable means it may be stored and shown.
Keep reading
- Indexing: Indexing is when a search engine processes a crawled page and stores it in its index so it can appear in search results.
- Noindex: Noindex is a directive, set in a meta tag or HTTP header, that tells search engines not to include a page in their results.
- Canonical URL: A canonical URL is the version of a page search engines treat as the main one when several URLs show the same or very similar content.
- Crawlability: Crawlability is how easily search engine and AI crawlers can discover and fetch the pages on a site.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free console for site owners. It shows how Bing crawls and indexes a site and offers SEO reports and URL submission.
- Content delivery network: A CDN is a network of servers worldwide that caches and serves a site's files close to each visitor, cutting load times and shielding the origin server.
- Crawl Errors: Crawl errors are failures that happen when a search engine tries to fetch a URL, such as server errors, redirect problems, blocked pages or DNS failures.
- Googlebot: Googlebot is the web crawler Google uses to fetch pages for Search. It discovers URLs, downloads them and passes them on to be rendered and indexed.
