Indexing and Crawling: Questions Answered
How Google finds, crawls and indexes pages, how to check whether a page is indexed, and how sitemaps, noindex tags, canonical tags and redirects affect it.
Each answer below gives the short version first. Open the full article for the steps, the reasons and the official sources.
12 questions on Indexing and Crawling
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| Find Redirect Chains Without a 200 Pound Monthly Tool | A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to B, then to C, instead of straight to C. Each hop loses roughly 15 percent of link equity and adds 100 to 500ms of load time, so find redirect chains and point every redirect directly at the final destination. |
| How to make sure your website is indexed by Google? | Add and verify your site in Google Search Console, submit an XML sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to check pages and request indexing. Make sure robots.txt is not blocking the pages, that they have no accidental noindex tags, and that other pages on your site link to them. |
| How do you check if your pages are actually indexed? | Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console: paste in the full URL to see whether it is indexed, when Google last crawled it and any problems stopping it being indexed. For many pages at once, use the Pages report in Search Console. Typing site: followed by the URL into Google is a quicker but less reliable check. |
| How do you check if a page is indexed online? | Type site: followed by the full page URL into Google. If the page appears, it is indexed. If it does not, confirm it in Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool, because the site: search sometimes misses pages that are indexed. Search Console also tells you why a page is not indexed. |
| How to check if an article is indexed or not? | Type site: followed by the full article URL into Google. If it appears, it is indexed. For a reliable answer, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which shows the indexing status, the last crawl date and any problems. If it says crawled but not indexed, Google visited the article but chose not to include it. |
| How to check if a page is no index? | View the page's source and look in the head section for a robots meta tag containing noindex. Also check the HTTP response headers for an X-Robots-Tag with noindex, because that does not appear in the page's HTML. Browser developer tools show both, and Google's URL Inspection tool reports it too. |
| How to check if something is indexed? | Paste the full URL, including https://, into the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. It tells you whether the page is indexed and flags any problems. Typing site: followed by the URL into Google is quicker but less reliable and gives less detail. |
| How to tell if a page is indexed on Google? | Type site: followed by the full URL into Google. If the page appears, it is indexed. For more detail, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, which shows the indexing status, the last crawl date, the canonical Google has chosen, how Google rendered the page, and lets you request indexing. |
| Image and Video Sitemaps: What Google Requires | Image and video sitemaps list media inside the entry for the page that shows it, not as separate entries. Images need only their URL. Each video needs a thumbnail of at least 160x90 pixels, a title, a description and a video file or player URL. Only include media that is really on a page. |
| Special Characters in URLs Can Break Your Whole Sitemap | Special characters in URLs break sitemaps because sitemaps are strict XML files. A raw ampersand makes the whole file invalid, so Google can reject every URL in it, and spaces create URLs that do not work. URL-encode each file and folder name, XML-escape every URL, validate the file, and prefer lowercase hyphenated names. |
| A Canonical Tag Pointing to Your Dev Site: How to Catch It | A canonical tag pointing to a development site tells Google your live page is a duplicate of the dev page. To catch it, search your files for dev or staging addresses, fetch the live page to read its served canonical, and check every address that can serve the page. |
| How long does it take Google to crawl and index a new site or page, and can I make Google crawl my site? | Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and indexing is never guaranteed. You cannot force Google to crawl, but you can ask: use Request indexing in the URL Inspection tool for a few pages, or submit a sitemap in Search Console for many. Asking again for the same URL does not make it faster. |