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SEO Glossary

SEO Term

Indexing

The process of a search engine storing a page so it can appear in results — crawling and indexing are not the same thing.

Crawling is Google fetching a page; indexing is deciding it's worth keeping and eligible to rank — a page can be crawled and still never indexed. The two statuses that catch site owners out are "Discovered – currently not indexed" (Google knows the URL but hasn't prioritized crawling it) and "Crawled – currently not indexed" (it looked but judged the content too thin or duplicate). Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to see which state a page is in before guessing at fixes.

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