Question 1

Why is my page not indexed by Google?

Accepted Answer

The most common reasons a page is not indexed by Google are: (1) The page has a noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag: noindex header; (2) Googlebot is blocked in robots.txt with a Disallow rule; (3) The page returns a non-200 status code (4xx or 5xx); (4) The canonical tag points to a different URL, causing Google to index the canonical instead; (5) The page was recently published and hasn't been crawled yet; (6) The page has no inbound links and isn't in a sitemap. Check each of these signals with this tool, then verify in Google Search Console.

Question 2

How do I check if a specific URL is indexed by Google?

Accepted Answer

There are several ways to check if a URL is indexed by Google: (1) Use the site: search operator — search "site:example.com/page" in Google; if it appears, it's indexed. (2) Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool for the most authoritative answer. (3) Use this free indexability checker to identify technical barriers that would prevent Google from indexing the page. (4) Check if Google has cached the page by searching "cache:example.com/page". This checker analyzes robots.txt, noindex directives, canonical tags, HTTP status, and sitemap inclusion.

Google Index Checker

What gets checked