What is indexation?
Indexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to return it. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed, and being indexed is not the same as ranking.
The three states are worth keeping separate because the fixes differ entirely. Not crawled means the engine has not fetched the page: a discovery or crawl-budget problem. Crawled but not indexed means it fetched the page and declined to store it: a quality or duplication judgement. Indexed but not ranking is a competitive problem.
Google Search Console reports these distinctly, and the bucket determines the remedy. Discovered, currently not indexed usually points at trust and links. Crawled, currently not indexed or Duplicate without user-selected canonical points at the page itself, and no amount of link building fixes a template problem.
Related
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is how much crawling a search engine is willing to spend on your site. On a new or low-authority domain it is small, which is why publishing more pages can reduce how many get indexed.
- Thin contentThin content is a page that exists to be indexed rather than to be read. Google's test is purpose and added value, not word count.
- Canonical tagA canonical tag tells a search engine which URL is the preferred version of a page when several URLs show similar content.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.