It costs nothing to get your page in search results, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.
As long as your page meets the minimum technical requirements, it’s eligible to be
indexed by Google Search:
- Googlebot isn’t blocked.
- The page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP
200 (success)status code. - The page has indexable content.
Googlebot isn’t blocked (it can find and access the page)
Google only indexes pages on the web that are accessible to the public and which don’t
block our crawler, Googlebot,
from crawling them. If a page is made private, such as requiring a log-in to view it,
Googlebot will not crawl it. Similarly, if one of the
several mechanisms are
used to block Google from indexing, the page will not be indexed.
Check if Googlebot can find and access your page
Pages that are blocked by robots.txt
are unlikely to show in Google Search results. To see a list of pages that are inaccessible to
Google (but that you would like to see in Search results), use both the
Page Indexing report
and Crawl Stats report
in Search Console. Each report may contain different information about your URLs, so it’s a good idea to look at both reports.
To test a specific page, use the URL Inspection tool.
The page works (it’s not an error page)
Google only indexes pages that are served with an
HTTP 200 (success) status code.
Client and server error pages aren’t indexed. You can check the HTTP status code for a given
page with the URL Inspection tool.
The page has indexable content
Once Googlebot can find and access a working page, Google checks the page for indexable
content. Indexable content means:
- The textual content is in a file type that Google Search supports.
- The content doesn’t violate our spam policies.
How we apply this
This is a short list, and that is the point: if a site is not indexed, the cause is rarely here. We check these four items first anyway because ruling them out in ten minutes stops a team from spending a week on the wrong hypothesis.
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