Indexability

Technical explanation

Indexability depends on successful access, index directives, canonicalisation, content availability, response status, and the absence of blocking conditions. Search engines still decide whether and how to index a page based on duplication, quality, and other signals.

Business relevance

Indexability controls whether valuable pages can appear in organic search. Separating it from crawlability helps teams diagnose why discovered pages are absent from results.

Implementation example

A published term returns 200, includes a self-referencing canonical, has no noindex directive, appears in the sitemap, and is linked from the directory.

Limitations and common misconceptions

Being indexable does not guarantee being indexed, retained, ranked, or shown for a query. Robots.txt controls crawling and is not a reliable method for preventing a URL from being indexed.

Topics

Sources