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1 How to read the Indexing Report
Should you worry when Search Console lists pages as not indexed? Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how to read the Page Indexing report and whether a 404 always means a broken site.
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20 videos.
A page can only turn up in Google results once Google has stored it in its index. Indexing is that storing step, and it comes after crawling, when a search engine has fetched the page. Plenty of site owners meet it first as a puzzling line in Search Console: "not indexed".
Beginners could start with How to read the Indexing Report, where Google's Martin Splitt and John Mueller go through that report. For the basics from a software maker, How Search Engine Indexing Works? comes from Rank Math, which sells SEO tools.
Larger sites may prefer What is Index Bloat? from Moz, another tool company. Talks from 2019 to 2021 describe how things worked then, so compare them with Google's current documentation.
Practise with: Tools for crawling and site audits
Official source
Should you worry when Search Console lists pages as not indexed? Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how to read the Page Indexing report and whether a 404 always means a broken site.
Sells in this field
Search engine indexing is broken into crawling, indexing and ranking, followed by ways to control what gets indexed so that content is found.
Sells in this field
Google Search Console is free, and this tutorial goes through 12 situations, from pages missing from the index to sudden traffic drops, plus the new Generative AI report.
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Getting pages crawled and indexed faster is the aim of this Wix webinar, where Fabrice Canel from Bing presents IndexNow and Crystal Carter answers common indexing questions.
Older: check current guidanceIndependent practitioner
Crawl budget is how many pages crawlers can get through in a set time, according to this BrightonSEO 2021 interview with Joanna Beech, which also covers how to deal with it.
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How Google crawls and indexes pages is the topic as Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land puts live questions to Martin Splitt of Google about the technical side of search.
Older: check current guidanceSells in this field
Index bloat is what happens when pages sit in the index and bring no visitors. Tom Capper separates it from crawl budget, explains how to check your site and suggests cleanup steps.
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Canonical errors in Google Search Console, including the alternate page status, can be fixed by following this walkthrough, which also explains how canonical tags point search engines to the preferred version of a page.
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PDF files in search get their own treatment at Google, and Martin Splitt and John Mueller explain how they are indexed, when HTML is the better choice, and traps like rasterised text.
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Crystal Carter talks with Martin Splitt about a site that no crawling tool could crawl fully, the steps and tools used to fix it, and how monitoring can head it off.
Older: check current guidanceOfficial source
Which steps help diagnose common JavaScript SEO problems? Martin Splitt of Google goes through them in a short web.dev LIVE session.
Older: check current guidanceIndependent practitioner
JavaScript SEO and Google indexation come up in an interview where the guest explains the challenges of learning the field and how server log analysis helped them learn it quickly.
Older: check current guidanceTrade press or conference
Andor Palau goes through crawling, indexing and log files using real log file analysis data, with ideas for improving each area on your own site.
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Technical SEO audits often miss staging site leaks, parameter bloat and indexed 404 pages. This tutorial uses Google search operators to find them, plus exposed files and security leaks.
Trade press or conference
Does optimising crawl budget improve web traffic? Vanessa Fox joins this podcast episode to talk about how search engines discover, crawl and index content.
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Pages missing from Google's index are the problem here, with the speaker asking how much content goes unindexed, how SEOs should think about JavaScript websites, and presenting a new toolset.
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Martin Splitt of Google joins Bartosz Goralewicz and Tomek Rudzki to talk rendering SEO, the future of technical optimisation and why SEO should look beyond JavaScript.
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News SEO exposes a lot about how Google crawls, indexes and judges authority, argues Barry Adams, because Google must find and rank new articles quickly.
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Programmatic SEO takes centre stage in Charles Floate's interview with Robert Niechcial, which also looks at indexing large sites, AI sites in other languages and the Polish SEO industry.
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Dawn Anderson explains what the AI era changes for crawling, indexing and technical SEO, and argues RAG works from a web index rather than live data.