Definition

What is Indexability?

Whether a page is eligible to appear in search results — controlled by the page's `noindex` meta tag, robots.txt, and canonical URL.

A page is indexable if (1) it's not blocked in robots.txt, (2) it doesn't have a `<meta name="robots" content="noindex">` tag, (3) it returns a 200 status, and (4) its canonical URL points to itself (not somewhere else). Common indexability bugs: forgotten staging `noindex` tags that ship to production; canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL; soft-404s on category pages with no items. Diagnose with Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool — it shows exactly why a page isn't indexed.

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