Indexing

The process by which search engines add crawled pages to their searchable database after evaluating content quality.

After crawling and rendering a page, Google processes it for indexing. This involves analysing the content, evaluating quality signals, determining the topic and intent, and deciding whether the page deserves a spot in the index. Not every crawled page is indexed — Google applies quality thresholds and may exclude thin content, duplicates, or low-quality pages.

A page can be crawled but not indexed for many reasons: noindex directive, too similar to another URL (duplicate content), thin or low-quality content, soft 404 (page returns 200 but displays "not found" content), blocked resources preventing proper rendering, or simply not meeting Google's quality bar.

Monitor indexing status in Google Search Console under Coverage (now called Pages). "Discovered — currently not indexed" means Google found the URL but hasn't crawled it yet. "Crawled — currently not indexed" means Google crawled it but chose not to index it, often a quality signal.