Indexing

A page outside the index cannot show up in Google, however good it is. On a local business site that means the pages that count: your services, your contact page and the articles you want people to find.

Indexing is neither automatic nor certain. Google says not every page it processes gets indexed, and tells you not to expect every address on your site to be in. What matters is that your important pages are. First comes crawling: Google has to fetch a page before it can decide whether to store it.

1. In Google Search Console, type the full address of a page into the inspection bar at the top. URL is on Google means the page is indexed and can appear in results. URL is not on Google means it can't, and the tool shows why.
2. If an important page is missing and you have fixed the cause, click Request indexing once. There is a daily limit, a request is no promise, and Google says it can take up to a week or two.
3. For the whole site, open the Page indexing report (Pages, under Indexing). It splits your addresses into Indexed and Not indexed, and the table Why pages aren't indexed gives the reason for each group.

• Discovered - currently not indexed, or Crawled - currently not indexed: Google knows the page but has not stored it. Our guide to the first of the two walks through what to do.
• URL marked noindex: the page itself asks to be left out, for example through a search setting in the website builder.
• Duplicate pages: when several pages look the same, Google indexes the one it finds most representative and treats the others as copies.
• URL blocked by robots.txt: Google is not allowed to read the page.