Indexability is whether Google is allowed to store a page in its index. Crawlability gets a bot to the page. Indexability decides if it can ever rank.
Indexability is whether a page can be added to Google’s index once it has been crawled. If a page is not indexable it cannot rank, no matter how good it is. Crawlability and indexability get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing: crawling is Google reaching the page, indexing is Google keeping it.
The difference that trips people up
A page can be crawlable and not indexable. That is what a noindex tag does: Google fetches the page, reads the instruction and discards it. A page can also be indexable in principle but never crawled, because nothing links to it and it is missing from the sitemap.
The distinction matters when you are diagnosing a problem, because the fixes are completely different. Blocking a page in robots.txt to remove it from the index actually prevents the fix, since Google can no longer crawl the page to see the noindex tag you added.
What stops a page being indexed
Most cases come down to a handful of causes, and Search Console’s Page Indexing report will name the one you have.
- Noindex directives. In a meta robots tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. The header version is the one people miss, because it is invisible in the page source.
- Canonical tags pointing elsewhere. A page canonicalised to another URL is telling Google not to index it. Templates often get this wrong across a whole section at once.
- Robots.txt blocks. These prevent crawling, which usually prevents indexing, though a blocked URL with strong links can still appear as a bare result.
- Thin or duplicate content. Google may crawl the page, decide it adds nothing, and file it under crawled but not indexed. This is a quality judgement, not a technical fault.
- Status codes and redirects. A 404, a soft 404 or a redirect chain means there is nothing at that URL worth keeping.
Checking it properly
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console for individual pages: it tells you whether the page is indexed and why not. For site wide checks, crawl with Screaming Frog and filter by indexability status, then compare that list against your sitemap and your Page Indexing report. The three rarely agree, and the gaps are where the problems live.
Indexation audits are one of the first things we run in any technical SEO project, because a site with 60% of its pages excluded has a bigger problem than its rankings suggest.
Related reading: our guides to robots.txt, log file analysis, HTTP status codes, submitting your website to search engines, the URL Inspection API, fixing Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt and fixing Crawled - currently not indexed.
Common questions
How do I get a page out of the index properly?
Add a noindex tag and leave the page crawlable until Google has processed it. Check the URL Inspection tool to confirm removal, then block it in robots.txt afterwards if you want to save crawl budget. Doing it in the other order leaves the page stuck in the index.
What does crawled but not indexed mean?
Google visited the page and decided not to keep it. There is no technical block. It is usually a quality or duplication signal, so look at whether the page says anything the rest of your site does not, and whether anything internal links to it.
Should every page on my site be indexable?
No. Internal search results, filtered listings, thank you pages, tag archives and staging URLs are better kept out. A smaller, cleaner index tends to perform better than a large one full of near duplicates competing with each other.
How long does indexing take?
From a few hours to several weeks. Established sites that publish often get crawled and indexed quickly. New sites with few links can wait a long time, and no tool or submission speeds that up much beyond requesting indexing once.
See our glossary entry for indexability.
