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Google Indexing

ContentVitals uses the Google Search Console URL Inspection API to check whether your pages are indexed, when they were last crawled, and which canonical URL Google has selected. Understanding these signals is critical for diagnosing why pages aren't appearing in search results.

Index Status

What it means

Whether Google has discovered, crawled, and added your page to its search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.

Status values

IndexedGoogle has crawled your page and added it to the search index. It can appear in search results.

Not IndexedGoogle knows about the page but has chosen not to index it — or hasn't crawled it yet. The page cannot appear in search results.

Partially IndexedGoogle has indexed the page but with caveats — for example, the indexed version may be outdated, or some resources on the page couldn't be loaded.

How to improve

  • Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console to help Google discover all your pages.
  • Ensure pages aren't blocked by robots.txt or noindex meta tags unintentionally.
  • Fix crawl errors — broken links, server errors (5xx), and redirect chains prevent indexing.
  • Build internal links to important pages — orphan pages with no inbound links are harder for Google to discover.
  • For new or updated pages, use the URL Inspection tool in GSC to request indexing.

Last Crawled

What it means

The most recent date Google's crawler (Googlebot) visited and fetched your page. Frequent crawling means Google considers your content important and likely to change.

Why it matters

If a page hasn't been crawled recently, any updates you've made won't be reflected in search results. Pages that are crawled infrequently may also rank lower because Google has less confidence in their freshness.

How to improve

  • Update content regularly — Google crawls frequently-updated pages more often.
  • Improve internal linking — pages linked from high-traffic pages get crawled sooner.
  • Reduce page load time — slow pages waste Googlebot's crawl budget, causing it to crawl fewer pages.
  • Avoid soft 404s — pages that return 200 OK but show error/empty content confuse crawlers.
  • Use the URL Inspection tool to manually trigger a recrawl after major updates.

Google Canonical

What it means

The URL that Google has selected as the canonical (authoritative) version of your page. When multiple URLs serve similar content, Google picks one as canonical and may ignore the others.

Why it matters

If Google's canonical doesn't match your page URL, it means Google considers a different URL as the primary version. This can happen with www/non-www duplicates, trailing slashes, HTTP/HTTPS variants, or genuinely duplicate content. The non-canonical version may not rank or may be dropped from the index entirely.

How to improve

  • Set a self-referencing canonical tag on every page: <link rel="canonical" href="your-page-url" />.
  • Ensure consistency — your canonical URL should match the URL in your sitemap, internal links, and any redirects.
  • Redirect all URL variants (www, non-www, HTTP, trailing slash) to a single canonical version with 301 redirects.
  • Avoid duplicate content across multiple URLs — use canonical tags to point to the preferred version.
  • Check Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to see which canonical Google has selected.

Further Reading