Indexing
Whether a search engine has stored the page. Being stored is not the same as being first.
What does Indexing mean?
The step where a search engine stores a page so it can appear in results. A live page is not automatically an indexed page, and indexed is not the same as highly ranked.
Also called: index, Google index
Three different states
A page can be unpublished, published but unseen, or stored in an index. Customers with the link can open a published page either way. Only the stored page is eligible to show when someone searches. Google Search Console is where Google tells you which state it thinks a URL is in.
Rank is a fourth idea. An indexed page can sit far down the results. Owners collapse all of this into Google does not know I exist. The fix depends on which state you are actually in.
Why a new site waits
Crawlers find pages by links and by sitemaps. A brand-new domain with no links can take a while to be fetched. A domain that already had a site can be fetched sooner and still reshuffle as the words change. Neither case comes with a date we will print.
Accidental blocks are the case you can act on: a robots.txt disallow, a noindex left on from a draft, or a canonical tag pointing everything at one URL. Those are configuration, not luck.
What to do on purpose
Launch the real pages, redirect the old addresses, submit the sitemap if you use Console, and make the important pages reachable from the homepage. Then stop refreshing the search box every hour. Write the service area and the services clearly so that, once indexed, the page is about the right thing.
We will not sell an indexing guarantee. We will remove the unforced errors before the domain moves. If a page still will not enter the index, Console's reason is the next reading, and we can look at that screen with you.
An example
A landscaper searched the new headline the afternoon of launch and assumed the site had failed. The page was live, the old domain redirected, and Console had not stored the new URL yet. A week later the URL was indexed. The position was ordinary. The panic had been about the wrong state.
Questions we get asked
Can I pay Google to index me?
Indexing is not an ad product. Ads are a separate purchase and are not part of the website offer. You can request indexing in Search Console. The request is not a contract.
Should I index every page?
Index the pages you want strangers to find. Thank-you pages, previews, and thin duplicates should stay out. More URLs are not a better site.
