Has Google found all your pages?

Getting started

Most new users are most concerned whether Google has found all their pages. Here are a few tips to get started:

  • If your site is new, patience.... It can take a few days for your pages to appear on Google after they are first posted.
  • If your site is small (less than about 500 pages), simply search for your site homepage URL on Google without the http:// or https:// part. If Google shows the page in the results, then the page is on Google. If your homepage is on Google, and your site has good navigation (meaning that you can follow links from one page to the next, and eventually find all the pages in your site), then Google should be able to find all the pages on your site. If certain pages are unlinked, or require special user input (such as selecting a dropdown option) to be reached, you can tell Google explicitly to crawl those pages. Search for page URLs rather than text, because your page might be indexed by Google, but might not appear in the first page of results.
  • If your site is larger than around 500 pages, you might consider using the Page Indexing report. If your site is smaller than that, or isn't adding new content regularly, you probably don't need to use this report.

Understanding the Page Indexing report

The Page Indexing report shows how many pages on your site that Google has tried to crawl, and whether or not Google indexed those pages. This provides an overall view of your site coverage on Google. To see the index status for a specific page, use the URL Inspection report.

Here's the coverage report showing results for a large site:

Index report graph, with all 4 status types selected: Error, Valid with warnings, Valid, Excluded

The totals above the chart show the number of indexed and non-indexed pages as of the last date on the chart. Note that if Google doesn't know about a URL, it won't be in either total.

Each bar in the chart at the top shows the total number of pages that Google has indexed (or tried to index) as of that date, not the number of pages Google tried to index on that specific day.

A URL can be in one of the following states:

  • Indexed: Google has crawled this page, and it is in the index.
    • Next steps: Nothing! You're good. You can see a sample of your indexed pages by clicking View data about indexed pages.
  • Not indexed: The page is not indexed, but this is not always a problem. If the Source column value is Website, that means you can probably fix the issue, if you need to. If the Source column value is Google, then you probably can't get that page indexed (probably for a good reason).
    • Next steps:
      • Confirm that your important pages are indexed.
      • For items with Source value Website, read the status description to decide if this is something that you need to fix, and if so, how to fix it.
      • If you see a spike in not indexed pages, confirm that you haven't accidentally blocked a section of your site from crawling.

Basic usage

  1. Check the Coverage report monthly, or whenever you make large changes to the site (adding large amounts of new or updated content, or blocking segments of the site from crawling). Remember that changes can take a few days to reach this report. You probably don't need to monitor this report daily or even weekly when you aren't taking such actions, because Google should send you an email message when an error spike occurs. You can also view your Search Console messages in your message panel. Check to make sure that your important pages are indexed.
  2. Look for a gradually increasing count of valid indexed pages as your site grows. If you see drops or spikes, see the troubleshooting section. The status table in the summary page is grouped and sorted by "status + reason"; you should fix your most impactful errors first. Remember that it takes a few days for new content to be discovered
  3. Investigate, and if necessary, fix not indexed pages. Select the Not indexed chart filter, then click into the table rows to monitor and fix issues by issue type. You can click into each issue type to see an example of affected pages, and click a page URL to see even more details. Use the URL Inspection tool to debug crawling and indexing issues for a specific page (you can open the tool directly from the examples table in the Coverage report). Follow the Learn more links to learn what the error is, whether it should be fixed, and how to fix it.
  4. Periodically check for spikes in not indexed items to make sure these are not indexed for a good reason.

What not to look for

You should not expect all URLs on a large site to be indexed. Your goal is to get all your critical pages indexed, and the canonical versions of your pages. (You can find the canonical for any URL by running the URL Inspection tool.)

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?
Search
Clear search
Close search
Google apps
Main menu
14182630019906056042
true
Search Help Center
true
true
true
true
true
83844
false
false