In plain English
If crawling is the librarian finding a book, indexing is the book being catalogued and put on the shelf. A book that never gets catalogued can't be found by anyone searching the catalogue.
Used in a sentence
“All the new pages are indexed now; you can see them in Search Console's indexing report.”
“Search Console says our service pages were crawled but not indexed, and I had no idea what that meant.”
In detail
After crawling a page, Google decides whether to add it to its index. It weighs whether the page is useful, whether it duplicates another page, and whether it's allowed to be indexed. Pages marked noindex, near-duplicates and thin pages are often left out.
Search Console's indexing report shows which pages are indexed and why others aren't. "Crawled, currently not indexed" usually means Google didn't think the page was worth adding yet, which is a cue to make it more useful or more distinct from your other pages.
Why it matters for your business
Only indexed pages can appear in Google. Every page that matters should be in the index.
- Check the indexing report regularly
- Fix duplicates and thin pages
- Request indexing for important new pages
Easy to mix up
Being indexed isn't ranking. An indexed page is eligible to show; ranking is where it appears for a given search. A page can be indexed and still sit too far down for anyone to see.
Related terms
Crawling, Noindex and Search Console. Or browse the whole glossary.
