Indexation

What it means

Indexation is the second step in how search engines find and rank pages. After crawling (discovering and fetching the page) comes indexation (analyzing the page and adding it to the search engine's index). A page can be crawled but not indexed — and pages not in the index cannot rank for anything.

Indexation failures fall into two categories: signals you control (robots noindex, canonical pointing elsewhere, crawl-blocking robots.txt) and signals search engines control (perceived low quality, duplicate content, soft 404, crawl-but-no-render issues).

The Google Search Console Index Coverage report is the source of truth for indexation status. It groups URLs into Indexed, Excluded, Errors, and Valid with warnings — each with specific reasons. Auditing this report regularly is the foundational technical SEO discipline.

Key takeaways

• A page must be both crawled and indexed before it can rank
• Google Search Console's Index Coverage report shows the actual state
• 'Crawled — currently not indexed' usually signals perceived low content quality
• Removing low-value pages from the index often improves rankings of the remaining pages