Why isn't my page indexed? A decision tree

"My page isn't on Google" has exactly five root causes. People guess at them randomly; working through them in order turns a mystery into a checklist. Start at the top — the causes are ordered from most mechanical to most judgmental, and each step's tools are listed.

Step 1: Is the page blocked from crawling?

Google can't index what it can't fetch (mostly — see the caveat). Check robots.txt first: does any rule block the URL for Googlebot? Test the exact path with a robots.txt tester — remember rules are prefixes, so Disallow: /blog also blocks /blog-news.

Also under this step: the page must return HTTP 200 to crawlers (not 404, not 500, not an auth redirect), and it must not require cookies or JavaScript to show its content.

The caveat: a robots-blocked URL can still appear in results as a bare link if other sites link to it. Blocking is not removal.

Step 2: Is the page noindexed?

Look for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the HTML and X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the response headers — a page check surfaces both. Noindex accidents are endemic: a staging setting that shipped, an SEO plugin toggle, a template applied too broadly.

The compounding failure: noindex + robots block together. The block prevents Google from ever seeing the noindex, so the page can linger half-indexed indefinitely. If you want it gone, unblock it and let the noindex be read.

Step 3: Does the page canonicalize somewhere else?

A canonical tag pointing at a different URL says "index that one instead" — and Google usually obliges by dropping this one. Common versions: every paginated page canonicalizing to page one, a template stamping the homepage canonical on everything, or parameter pages canonicalizing correctly (which is fine and intentional).

Check the canonical with the same page check, and confirm it points at the page itself unless you specifically mean otherwise.

Step 4: Can Google discover the page at all?

No blocks, no noindex, correct canonical — but Google's never fetched it. In Search Console's URL Inspection this reads "URL is not on Google" with little crawl history, or the Pages report shows "Discovered – currently not indexed."

Discovery runs on links and sitemaps:

• Is the page in your XML sitemap? Validate with the sitemap checker.
• Do internal links point at it — from pages that are themselves indexed? An orphan page (zero internal links) is invisible no matter how good it is.
• Is it more than three or four clicks from your homepage? Depth reads as unimportance.

Step 5: Did Google judge it not worth indexing?

The residual case, and the honest one: "Crawled – currently not indexed." Google fetched the page, evaluated it, and declined. There's no technical fix because nothing is technically wrong — the page lost a quality judgment. Usual reasons:

• Thin: a few hundred words that answer nothing fully.
• Near-duplicate: 90% identical to a sibling page (see fixing duplicate titles — duplication usually runs deeper than titles).
• Templated at scale: a thousand location pages differing only in the city name.

The fix is editorial: consolidate near-duplicates into one strong page, expand the thin ones that deserve to exist, delete the ones that don't. Indexing follows value; it can't be configured into existence.

The five-minute version

1. robots.txt block? → test it
2. noindex meta or header? → check the page
3. canonical pointing elsewhere? → same check
4. in the sitemap and internally linked? → validate the sitemap
5. all clear? → it's a quality judgment; improve or consolidate the page