What is Indexability?
Indexability refers to whether a search engine can add a web page to its index. If a page isn't indexable, it won't appear in search results regardless of its content quality.
Factors that affect indexability:
- meta robots noindex tag (explicitly blocks indexing) - robots.txt disallow (blocks crawling, which prevents indexing) - Canonical tags pointing elsewhere (consolidates indexing to canonical URL) - HTTP status codes (4xx and 5xx pages aren't indexed) - Redirect chains (excessive redirects may prevent indexing) - Duplicate content (Google chooses one version to index) - Crawl budget (low-priority pages may not get crawled) - Page quality (extremely thin or spammy content may be excluded)
Check Google Search Console's 'Pages' report for indexing status. Common statuses: 'Indexed', 'Discovered - currently not indexed', 'Crawled - currently not indexed', and 'Excluded by noindex tag'.
Example
A product page returns a 200 status but has a noindex meta tag accidentally left from staging. The page functions normally for users but is completely invisible in Google search results.