DefinitionWhether a crawled page is allowed and able to be stored in a search engine's index. A page must be indexable before it can appear in search results at all.
Indexability is whether a page that a search engine has crawled is allowed and able to be stored in its index, the database it pulls results from. A page must be indexable before it can appear in search results at all: no index entry means no ranking, no clicks and no revenue. Crawlability comes first (can Googlebot read the page?), indexability second (may Google keep it?), and only then does ranking start.
The common misunderstanding is that crawling and indexing are the same thing. Shop owners see “Crawled” in a report and assume the page is live in Google. It is not: Google crawls far more pages than it indexes and decides per URL whether a page deserves a place. A page can be perfectly crawlable and still non-indexable because of a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, a redirect, or because Google judged it too thin or too similar to another page.
Why indexability matters for a webshop
For a webshop, indexability decides which product and category pages can earn organic traffic. If your best-selling category is accidentally set to noindex, every ranking for it is gone until it is fixed, and I have seen that cost a shop weeks of sales after a redesign. Nothing looks broken to a visitor, so nobody notices until the Search Console graph falls off a cliff.
The reverse also matters. Not everything deserves indexing; letting Google index thousands of filter combinations, internal search results and tag archives creates index bloat. Those pages compete with your real category pages and waste crawl budget on URLs that never convert. Good indexability work is two-sided: make sure the pages that should be indexable are, and keep the junk out deliberately.
How to check indexability
My first stop is the Pages report in Google Search Console. It splits every known URL into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion: “Excluded by noindex tag”, “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”, “Not found (404)”, “Page with redirect”, “Soft 404” and the one that worries shop owners most, “Crawled, currently not indexed”. For a single URL I use the URL Inspection tool, which shows whether indexing is allowed and which canonical Google selected. The site: operator is a rough sanity check at best, never a measurement.
Search Console only tells you what Google thinks; to see what your site is actually sending, I crawl it with Screaming Frog. The Indexability column marks every URL as Indexable or Non-Indexable, and the Directives tab shows why: noindex in the meta robots tag or the X-Robots-Tag header, a canonical to another URL, a redirect or a 4xx status. Comparing the crawl with the Search Console export is where the real findings come from, because the two rarely agree completely.
Common indexability mistakes
Leaving the staging noindex on after launch. WordPress has a “Discourage search engines” checkbox, Shopify password-protected stores send noindex, and PrestaShop and Lightspeed have their own equivalents. If that setting travels to production, the whole shop drops out of Google within days.
Blocking a page in robots.txt and expecting noindex to work. A noindex tag only works if Google can read the page. If the same URL is blocked in robots.txt, Googlebot never sees the tag and the URL can stay indexed with an empty snippet. To remove a page, allow crawling and use noindex.
Canonicalising variants without checking the result. Canonicalising colour or size variants to the parent product is usually right, and WooCommerce product_tag archives and Shopify tag pages are often better off noindexed. But I regularly find category pages canonicalised to the homepage after a plugin update, which makes them non-indexable for a reason nobody intended.
Treating out-of-stock and removed products as indexable forever. A product that is permanently gone should return a 410 or redirect to the closest alternative, not sit in the index as a dead end or a soft 404. Temporarily out-of-stock items can stay indexable if the page still has value, but thousands of empty product pages push a shop into “Crawled, currently not indexed” territory. The same goes for the 404 pages every crawl turns up.
How I handle indexability for clients
Indexability is one of the first things I check in a technical SEO audit, because everything else depends on it. I crawl the shop with Screaming Frog, export the Pages report from Search Console and join the two: which URLs should be indexed, which does Google actually index, and where do they disagree? Every mismatch gets a verdict: either the page should be indexable and something is blocking it, or it should not be and I write down how to keep it out (noindex, canonical or a 410).
The deliverable is a short indexation plan: a list of URL groups (products, categories, filters, tags, variants, search pages, legal pages) with the intended status for each and the setting that enforces it in the platform. I also make sure the XML sitemap only contains indexable URLs, so Google’s “Submitted and indexed” line in Search Console becomes a meaningful signal. From there, indexability becomes a monitoring task: a monthly glance at the Pages report catches a rogue noindex long before it hurts revenue.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between crawlability and indexability?
Crawlability is whether a search engine can reach and read a page; indexability is whether it is allowed and willing to store that page afterwards. A page can be crawlable but non-indexable (noindex, canonical elsewhere). Both must be in order before a page can rank.
Why does Search Console say “Crawled, currently not indexed”?
Google visited the page but decided not to index it, usually because it looks thin, duplicates another page or has few internal links. On webshops this is typical for near-identical variants, empty categories and filter pages. Either make the page genuinely distinct and better linked, or accept that it does not belong in the index and consolidate it.
Should filter and tag pages in my webshop be indexable?
Mostly no. A filter page is only worth indexing when it matches a real search, such as “zwarte leren laarzen maat 41”, and has enough products to deserve a result. Everything else (sort orders, price ranges, random tag combinations) should be noindexed or canonicalised to the parent category.
How long does it take for a page to become indexed after fixing a noindex?
It varies by site. Important pages that Google crawls often can be back within days; deep product pages can take weeks. Requesting indexing in the URL Inspection tool and strong internal links to the page speed things up.