What is indexing?

Search engines work in three steps: discovery (finding a URL through links or a sitemap), crawling (downloading and processing the page) and indexing (evaluating the content and storing it). Only indexed pages can appear in search results. Not every crawled page is indexed; Google leaves out duplicate, thin or noindex pages.

#Why it matters

A page that isn't indexed gets no traffic, however good it is. An important page dropping out of the index is often the first sign of a technical change (noindex, canonical, robots.txt, server errors), and catching it early limits the traffic loss.

#Where you see it in SEOAsist

• Monitors → Index status inspects your site's important pages with the Search Console URL Inspection API. The cards count Indexed (PASS), Neutral (NEUTRAL), Failing (FAIL) and Canonical mismatch; the table shows each URL's Verdict, Coverage, Indexing and Google last crawl. Pages that were indexed in the previous check but aren't now appear separately under Dropped from the index and trigger a notification. The weekly automatic check runs on Wednesdays at 02:00 UTC; start one any time with Check now.
• Sites → site → Indexing tab: instant notification to Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam via IndexNow, and sitemap submission for Google.

To connect Search Console: Connect Google Search Console.

#Example

The second page was crawled but not judged valuable enough; strengthen its content or noindex it.

#Common mistakes

• Treating a sitemap submission as a guarantee of indexing.
• Treating “Crawled - currently not indexed” as a technical error and just resubmitting; the problem is usually content quality.
• Reading a site: search as an exact index count.