Technical SEO FAQ · Indexing, Canonicalization & Duplicate Content
What is the difference between crawling, rendering, indexing, ranking and serving?
Crawling Google discovers and fetches URLs.
Rendering
Google executes relevant JavaScript to obtain the rendered page.
Indexing
Google processes the content and decides whether/how it should be represented in the index.
Ranking
For a search query, Google's systems determine the ordering of eligible results using many signals.
Serving
Google presents results to the user.
These are different stages. Solving a crawling problem does not automatically solve a ranking problem.
Related questions
- How do you determine why an important page isn't indexed?
- How do you investigate "Crawled - currently not indexed"?
- How do you investigate "Discovered - currently not indexed"?
- How do you validate whether an indexation fix actually worked?
- How would you identify index bloat?
- How would you manage indexation on a large e-commerce website?
- What happens when canonical and noindex signals conflict?
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- When should a page be canonicalized instead of noindexed?