Guide · Indexing
Getting your page indexed
“Discovered — currently not indexed.” “Crawled — currently not indexed.” Both Search Console phrases say the same thing: Google knows your URL and is holding its decision. Seven signals decide what happens next, and all seven can be read in the page itself. Here they are, with what shows them and what holds them.
What a machine reads
A search engine reads signals. The seven below share one property: each can be verified from the page as served, based on facts.
01
The page declares itself
A canonical URL designates the authoritative version. A page that designates itself remains a candidate for the index. When the canonical designates ANOTHER page, Google follows the instruction and keeps the other one.
See it: Read the page's link rel=canonical tag. The URL it contains is the page's own, to the letter: same protocol, same domain, same trailing slash.
Holding it: One canonical per page, matching the URL served. It's the first signal our engine compares, on every page, at every publication.
02
Directives open the crawl
Two directives govern access: the HTTP header and the page's robots tag. Left open, they let the page be crawled and indexed. A directive set during staging deserves to be reopened on go-live day — it often survives it.
See it: Read the robots value in the HTTP response and in the head. Check that robots.txt opens the path: an open path allows the crawl, and the crawl allows indexing.
Holding it: Open the directive, then announce the page. A reopened directive takes effect on the next pass; the announcement brings that pass forward.
03
The announcement brings the page into existence
A new page enters the index the day an engine comes back. An up-to-date sitemap and an immediate signal put that day in your hands rather than in its own.
See it: Does your sitemap contain the URL? Does its last-modified date match a real change?
Holding it: An accurate sitemap, plus an immediate signal to the engines that accept one. That is what IndexNow does, and it is free.
04
Your own links point to it
A search engine gauges a page's importance by the place your site gives it. A page linked from your already-known pages reads as a page you vouch for; it inherits their standing and their crawl frequency.
See it: Start from the homepage and reach the page by clicking. Three clicks are enough for a reader: they are enough for a crawler too.
Holding it: A link from an already-known page, with anchor text that names the subject. Explicit anchor text conveys that subject to the engine at the same time as to the reader.
05
The language cluster is complete
This is our own incident, spotted on 1 September 2026 in our Search Console: pages "crawled, currently not indexed", on a site that was otherwise flawless. The cause came down to one line — each page declared only some of its versions. The Dutch page announced fr and nl; the French page, fr and en. Six languages out of eight stayed outside the network.
See it: Count the hreflang tags on a translated page. They list ALL the languages in the group, plus x-default, and that list stays the same on every one of them — including the source page.
Holding it: The full cluster on every page. Since then, our publication guard requires a page to carry as many declarations as there are languages served.
06
Every URL carries its own purpose
Two URLs for the same purpose: the engine keeps one. Variations — filters, sorts, pagination, tracking parameters — multiply URLs while keeping the same purpose.
See it: Compare the visible text of the pages concerned. A reader who can say what sets them apart is looking at two distinct pages; the engine will see them that way too.
Holding it: Merge them, or clearly designate the authoritative version. A page earns its own URL when it answers a question the others leave open.
07
The text arrives in the response
Text present in the HTML response is indexed on the first pass. Text produced after execution waits for a second pass, which depends on rendering and its availability.
See it: Request the page with scripts disabled and read what comes back. Your title, your h1 and your main text are already there.
Holding it: Serve the text in the response. Our own site is published as served HTML: what you read is in the file, and the motion is done in CSS.
The order in which to look at them
The first three signals are directives: they are set in one line, and the effect follows the announcement of the page. The fourth and fifth are a matter of internal linking — the fix is quick, the effect shows on the next pass. The last two concern content and rendering: they take the longest to deal with, and deserve to be tackled once the first five are in place.
An observation drawn from our own incident: a site can be flawless on speed, structured data and accessibility, and still be waiting for indexing because of a partial language declaration. Technical quality and directives are verified separately. That is why verification comes before assumption.
See these seven signals on your page
The Checker reads your URL and reports the state of these signals, free, in about ten seconds. Your site stays exactly yours. The Audit SEO Records goes further: it reads your entire sitemap, page by page, and hands you a dated report.