Crawling & Indexing

Crawling and indexing are the two steps before a page can ever rank. Crawling is when a search engine’s bot discovers and reads your page; indexing is when it stores that page in its searchable database. No index, no rankings — the page simply doesn’t exist as far as search is concerned.

Why it matters

A page can be perfect and still get zero traffic if it was never crawled or wasn’t indexed. Common causes: blocked in robots.txt, a “noindex” tag, thin content the engine skipped, or no internal links pointing to it. Confirming a page is indexed is step one of any SEO check.

How to check

Search site:yourdomain.com/page in Google, or use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection. If the page isn’t there, nothing else you do to it matters yet.