Search and SEO
What is Indexation?
Indexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and considers it eligible to appear in results. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed: engines fetch far more than they keep, and the decision is a quality judgement.
Also called: indexing · getting indexed
The pipeline
- Discovery — the engine learns the URL exists, from a link or a sitemap
- Crawl — it fetches the URL
- Render — it executes JavaScript, if it renders at all
- Index — it decides whether to store the page
- Serve — it decides whether to show it for a query
Why a page might not be indexed
- It is blocked, noindexed, or canonicalised to another URL
- It renders empty because the content requires JavaScript
- It duplicates another page closely enough that one is enough
- Nothing internally links to it, so nothing suggests it matters
- It is judged too thin to be worth storing
How to check properly
Search Console URL Inspection, then Test Live URL and View Crawled Page. That is the engine telling you what it actually received, which beats any third-party simulation and settles most arguments in one click.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.