Technical SEO
Index Coverage
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What is Index Coverage?
Index coverage refers to the status of a site's URLs within Google's index — specifically, which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and why. Google Search Console's Page indexing report (formerly the Index Coverage report) groups URLs into "Indexed" and "Not indexed" and gives a reason for every excluded URL, such as "Excluded by noindex tag" or "Crawled - currently not indexed". Understanding index coverage is essential for diagnosing why certain pages are not appearing in search results.
Common index coverage issues include pages blocked by robots.txt (Google can't crawl them), noindex directives, duplicate content handled by canonicalization, soft 404s, server errors, and pages discovered but not yet crawled or indexed. Regularly auditing index coverage ensures that the pages you want indexed are included and low-value pages are properly excluded.
Why it matters for SEO
Index coverage is the definitive report of what Google has and hasn't indexed from a site. Pages not in the index cannot rank. Monitoring coverage reports regularly allows SEOs to catch indexing failures early and resolve them before they cause significant traffic loss.
Example
A site owner wonders why 400 of their 1,000 pages get no search traffic. Search Console's Page indexing report shows many listed under "Crawled - currently not indexed" and "Alternate page with proper canonical tag". The first group turns out to be thin tag archives, so they are noindexed; the second is expected and needs no action.
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