Indexing

Indexing is the process by which search engines organize information they have crawled. Before a page can appear in search results, it must be stored in the search engine’s index—a massive database of all the content the search engine has found. Technical SEO plays a critical role here, ensuring that valuable pages are indexable while preventing the indexing of low-quality or duplicate content. Issues with indexing can render even the best content invisible to users. Key tools for managing indexing include the noindex tag, canonical tags, and the XML sitemap, all of which guide search engine bots on what to include or exclude from the index.