Key takeaways
- A practical model of Google’s indexing decision (discovery → crawl → dedupe/canonical → store → refresh), plus the core entry pages that explain why URLs fail at the storage layer
Table of Contents
If your pages don’t appear in search, most people jump straight to “rankings”.
Most of the time it’s not.
It’s indexing: Google discovered the URL, maybe even crawled it, and then decided it’s not worth keeping (yet), or that another URL should represent the same content.
This page is the pillar for the indexing cluster on this site: a simple model + the main “entry points” that Google can classify.
Start with the anchors (single-intent entry pages)
- Why pages are not indexed (the 7 common reasons)
- Indexing vs ranking: the difference that changes the work
- Canonical vs duplicate content: what Google is actually deciding
- Orphan pages SEO: how to find them (and fix them fast)
If your problem is not storage but visibility after storage, switch to the neighboring hub:
- Indexed but not visible (2026): why indexing doesn’t guarantee traffic
- Indexed but no traffic (2026)
- Indexing and visibility (guide)
- Google indexing process (step-by-step)
If you want the status map layer:
Google doesn’t “index everything” — it evaluates
Google can fetch far more URLs than it wants to keep. So it evaluates:
- Cost: how expensive is it to crawl, render, dedupe, and refresh this URL?
- Value: does this URL add something the index doesn’t already have?
- Risk: is this site predictable and trustworthy enough to keep indexing deeply?
That’s why “request indexing” is not a magic button: it can speed up a fetch, but it doesn’t change the value/risk model.
The indexing decision (five gates)
Think of Google’s index as a curated store, not a backup drive.
For each URL, Google roughly asks:
- Can I fetch it reliably? (status codes, redirects, robots)
- Can I render/parse it? (HTML, JS, blocked resources)
- Is it a duplicate of something I already have? (canonicalization + near-duplicates)
- If it’s not a duplicate, is it worth keeping? (priority: site trust + internal hierarchy + incremental value)
- If I keep it, what is the canonical representative URL? (Google-selected canonical)
Most SEO advice starts at (4) “rankings”. Your real bottleneck is often (1)–(3).
Crawled ≠ Indexed: why this happens
“Crawled” means: Google fetched and processed the URL.
“Indexed” means: Google decided it’s worth storing and serving for queries.
That gap is where most modern SEO work lives.
Deep dives:
System context
Next step
If you want the fastest “entry page” for search intent, start with: