The process by which a search engine stores and organizes webpages so they can be considered for search results.
A page generally needs to be discovered and indexed before it can rank organically.
Short and sweet:
The process by which a search engine stores and organizes webpages so they can be considered for search results.
A page generally needs to be discovered and indexed before it can rank organically.
See also: Crawling, XML Sitemap, Technical SEO
Indexing is the step after crawling where a search engine analyzes a discovered page and stores it in its massive database of content, making that page eligible to actually appear in search results going forward. Being crawled doesn’t guarantee a page will be indexed, since a search engine may skip pages it judges as low-quality, duplicate, or blocked by a site’s own settings. Checking whether a specific page has been indexed is one of the most basic troubleshooting steps when a page fails to show up in search at all, since a ranking problem can’t be fixed if the page was never indexed in the first place.
A brand-new blog post won’t show up in Google search results until indexing has actually happened, a process that can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks depending on the site.
Site owners can check this status directly in Google Search Console, seeing exactly which pages of a site like an online bakery have been added to Google’s massive database.
A page accidentally blocked by a stray “noindex” tag will never appear in search results no matter how well-written it is, since that step simply never gets the chance to happen.
