Glossary

Browse the canonical term set. Each entry links to its own definition page.

Core2

Indexability

Indexability is whether a URL is technically allowed to enter a search index, judged from its robots rules, meta directives, canonical target, and HTTP status.

Canonical URL

A canonical URL is the version of a page you tell search engines to treat as the original when several URLs serve similar content.

Indexing4

Index State

Index state is the search engine’s own answer to "is this URL in the index right now" — reported per URL by Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Noindex

A noindex directive — a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header — tells search engines to keep a URL out of the index even if they can crawl it.

Discovered — Currently Not Indexed

A Google Search Console state meaning Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled and indexed it yet.

Crawled — Currently Not Indexed

A Google Search Console state meaning Google fetched the URL, evaluated it, and chose not to index it.

Crawling2

robots.txt

robots.txt is a file at the root of a domain that tells crawlers which paths they may request.

Redirect Chain

A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects between the requested URL and the page that finally responds.

Submission2

IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL has been added, updated, or deleted, instead of waiting for them to re-crawl it.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs a site wants search engines to know about, together with metadata such as last-modified time.