What is the difference between crawling and indexing?

Crawling is discovery: the bot fetches the page. Indexing is storage: the search engine decides the page is worth keeping and files it for retrieval. A page can be crawled and then not indexed, which is why Search Console reports Crawled - currently not indexed.

Why is my page crawled but not indexed?

Usually a quality judgement. The page may duplicate other content, be too thin to be useful, or be a near-copy of something already indexed. Sometimes it is technical, such as a canonical tag pointing elsewhere or a noindex directive left over from staging.

Technical SEO

Indexing

Indexing is the process of storing and organising crawled pages in a search engine's database so they can be returned for relevant queries.

A page must be indexed before it can rank. You can check coverage and fix indexing problems in Google Search Console. A page can be crawled but still not indexed if the engine judges it low quality or duplicative.

Crawled - currently not indexed is the status teams most often misread. It is rarely a bug, and requesting indexing repeatedly does not resolve it. Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth storing, usually because it duplicates something already indexed or adds nothing a ranking page does not already cover. The fix is editorial. Either make the page substantially different and more useful, consolidate it into a stronger page with a redirect, or accept that it should not exist. Large numbers of pages in this state are a signal that the site is publishing more than it needs.

Example

A firm publishes 60 near-identical location pages: "accounting services in [district]" with swapped place names. Search Console shows 51 stuck in Crawled - currently not indexed. Google fetched them and judged them duplicates. The fix that worked was collapsing them into eight genuinely different pages with district-specific pricing and staff, all of which indexed within a fortnight.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between crawling and indexing?: Crawling is discovery: the bot fetches the page. Indexing is storage: the search engine decides the page is worth keeping and files it for retrieval. A page can be crawled and then not indexed, which is why Search Console reports Crawled - currently not indexed.
Why is my page crawled but not indexed?: Usually a quality judgement. The page may duplicate other content, be too thin to be useful, or be a near-copy of something already indexed. Sometimes it is technical, such as a canonical tag pointing elsewhere or a noindex directive left over from staging.

Related terms

Crawling Noindex XML Sitemap

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