Indexing
Indexing is the process by which search engines store and organize the content of web pages in their database, making those pages eligible to appear in search results.
Before a page can appear in search results, it must be crawled and then indexed. Crawling is when search engine bots visit your page and read its content. Indexing is when they decide to store that content in their database.
Search engines extract entities, topics, and relationships from the content to understand what the page is about and which search queries it might be relevant for. You can monitor your site's index status through Google Search Console's Coverage report, which shows how many of your pages are indexed, which ones aren't, and why.
In practice
- A B2B company discovered via Google Search Console that only 40% of their blog posts were indexed because their thin content pages were diluting their crawl budget
- An e-commerce site with 100,000 product pages used the URL Inspection tool to prioritize indexing of their top 1,000 revenue-generating products
- A news publisher implemented IndexNow to instantly notify search engines of new articles, reducing time-to-index from days to minutes
- A startup's entire website was deindexed because a developer pushed a staging robots.txt to production, monitoring index coverage would have caught this immediately
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.