Indexing issues, traced page by page until the cause is found.

Crawling is Google fetching a page from your website, and indexing is its decision to store that page so it can appear in search results. They are separate steps, and a page can pass the first and fail the second. An indexing issue is a page you want found that hasn’t been stored, or one you never meant anyone to see that has.

How to tell whether a page is indexed

Google tells site owners directly. Search Console, Google’s own reporting account for a website, lists the pages it has indexed and the pages it hasn’t, with a stated reason for each. A page that was blocked, a page excluded by a noindex tag and a page that was crawled and then not indexed are different problems with different fixes.

What stops Google from reaching or keeping a page

Most indexing problems on a service site come from an instruction someone set and forgot. The robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of the site to stay out of, and a rule left over from development can shut out a whole folder. A noindex tag is a line in the page’s code asking search engines to leave the page out. Google obeys it.

Those two interact. If robots.txt blocks a page, Google never fetches it, so it never sees a noindex tag on it, and the bare address can still appear in results.

A canonical tag is a note that says the main version of this page is at another address. If it names the wrong page, Google may index that one instead. A page nothing else on the site links to is hard to find and looks unimportant, and the fix for that lies in the site’s architecture.

When Google reads a page and declines it

A page that was crawled and then left out usually has a content problem, and no setting fixes that. The common case on home-service sites is a set of city pages that are one page repeated with the place name swapped. Picture a plumbing company with near-identical pages for Oceanside, Vista and Carlsbad. Google may keep one and treat the others as duplicates. Resubmitting them changes nothing. The fix is to merge them, or to rebuild them as service area pages that each say something true and specific about their place.

What a sitemap and a recrawl request can do

Both are requests, and Google is free to ignore them. A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want indexed. It helps Google discover them, and it should list only live pages. Asking Google to recrawl a page can speed up a recheck after a fix. Neither makes Google keep a page it has judged not worth keeping.

You may also hear the term crawl budget, meaning how many pages Google will fetch from a site. By Google’s own guidance that is a concern for very large sites, not for a service company with a few hundred pages.

How I test an indexing fix

I fix one cause at a time and watch the affected pages. The first result is plain: the page is in the index or it isn’t. I check rankings about two weeks later, though whether an indexed page ranks is mostly a matter of on-page SEO.

Run across a whole site, this check belongs to a technical SEO audit. Indexing is the first layer of technical SEO, since a page that isn’t stored can’t rank however good it is.