Indexability

Whether a page can be stored in Google's index and made eligible to appear in search results.

Indexability refers to whether a page is eligible to be stored in Google's search index. A page can be perfectly crawlable but still not indexable — for example, if it has a 'noindex' meta tag, a 'noindex' response header, or is excluded by a canonical tag pointing to a different URL.

Common reasons a page may not be indexed: noindex directive (intentional or accidental), canonical tag pointing elsewhere, thin or duplicate content that Google deems unworthy of indexing, soft 404 errors (a page returns 200 status but has minimal content), or the page is orphaned with no inbound internal links.

Indexability is separate from crawlability. Google may crawl a page and then choose not to index it, or may index a page without having recently crawled it (using a cached version). Google Search Console distinguishes between these states in the Coverage report.

In B2B SEO, teams sometimes accidentally noindex important landing pages or conversion pages — particularly after CMS migrations, developer changes to templates, or staging/production environment mismatches where staging noindex rules leak to production.