Indexing, in detail
Short, opinionated notes on why Google does and doesn't index pages, from the people building the product.
The pages Google has never crawled, and why they can't be indexed
Before a page can be judged on quality it has to be fetched at all. How to measure the share of your site Google has no crawl record for, what causes it, and the changes that move the number.
Orphans, shallow pages, and nofollow-only links: the pages Google struggles to reach
The five indexability gates are per-page directives. This is about how pages connect: internal-link depth, orphan and shallow pages, nofollow-only inbound links, and broken internal links.
The checks that decide whether a page can be indexed
Five technical gates every URL has to clear before content quality matters: HTTP status, robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag, meta robots, and canonical — with what a healthy result looks like for each.
Don't trust an index checker as Google's word, ours included
A crawler can tell you a page is eligible to be indexed. It can't tell you whether Google has indexed it. Why the difference matters and where a free checker actually helps.
“Discovered” vs “Crawled – currently not indexed”: reading what Search Console tells you
The two Search Console states look alike and mean different things. What each one signals, why a URL gets stuck, and how we keep Google's verdict separate from our own diagnosis.