Index Status
In one sentence
Whether a page has been accepted into the index and is therefore eligible to appear in results.
Analogy Mental model
Whether the book made it into the catalogue. Until it does, the reader cannot find it, however good it is.
In practice What you actually do
Read the page indexing report by bucket rather than by total, and use URL inspection for individual pages. A page can be crawled, canonicalised elsewhere, blocked, or simply not selected, and each needs a different response.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Discovered but not indexed is the most common complaint and the least mysterious. It usually means the engine weighed the page against everything else it knows and decided not to spend a fetch on it yet.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →