Definition
Indexed pages represent the number of your website's pages that Google has crawled, analyzed, and added to its search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results. Tracking this metric in Google Search Console (Coverage report) is essential to ensure all your strategic pages are indexed and that unnecessary pages are not wasting crawl budget. A site may have indexation issues caused by technical errors (noindex, misconfigured canonical, server errors), duplicate content, or content that is too thin. The ratio of indexed pages to total site pages is a technical health indicator.
Key Points
- Only indexed pages can appear in search results
- Tracked via Google Search Console's Coverage report
- The indexed pages to total pages ratio is a technical SEO health indicator
Practical Examples
Indexation problem detection
An e-commerce site with 5,000 products shows only 1,200 indexed pages in Search Console. The audit reveals accidental noindex tags on category pages, blocking indexation of thousands of pages.
Crawl budget management
A blog with 800 articles has 3,200 indexed pages due to tag and archive pages. De-indexing low-value pages brings the total to 950, concentrating crawl budget on useful pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Use Google Search Console's Coverage report to see the exact number of indexed pages. You can also use the site:yourdomain.com command in Google for a quick estimate.
Common causes include: noindex tag, page blocked by robots.txt, server error (500), duplicate content, thin content, canonical pointing to another page, or the page is simply too deep in the site architecture for Google to discover it.
Go Further with LemmiLink
Discover how LemmiLink can help you put these SEO concepts into practice.
Last updated: 2026-02-07