How Do I Check if Google Has Indexed All My Pages?
The Search Console Pages report gives you the count and the reason for every exclusion. What each status means and how to fix the ones that matter.
How to see exactly which of your pages Google has indexed, what each exclusion reason means, and which ones are worth fixing.
TL;DR: Quick Answer
The Search Console Pages report gives you the count and the reason for every exclusion. What each status means and how to fix the ones that matter.
Key takeaways
- Very cheap quotes (under R5,000) almost always exclude copywriting, SEO, custom design and post-launch support
- Professional copywriting can represent 20-35% of a total website project cost, and is worth it for search visibility
- On-page SEO built into the website at launch costs a fraction of what it costs to retrofit after the site is live
- Hosting, SSL, domain and maintenance add R3,000-R10,000 per year on top of build cost
- E-commerce adds significant cost due to payment gateway integrations, product data, security requirements and checkout UX
- Timeline and client responsiveness directly affect cost: slow feedback rounds extend agency hours
An unindexed page ranks nowhere. It is the most complete form of SEO failure and one of the easiest to miss, because the page looks perfectly fine when you visit it yourself.
The quick check
Search site:yoursite.co.za in Google. The result count is approximate, but if you published 40 pages and Google shows 12, you have found something.
This tells you there is a problem. It does not tell you why, which is what the next step is for.
The proper check
Google Search Console, Indexing, Pages. This is the authoritative view: every URL Google knows about, split into indexed and not indexed, each exclusion with a reason.
Work down the reasons. Most are harmless and a few are urgent.
| Status | What it means | Act? |
|---|---|---|
| Excluded by noindex tag | The page tells Google not to index it | Yes, if unintended |
| Blocked by robots.txt | Crawling is blocked | Yes, if unintended |
| Crawled, currently not indexed | Read, judged not worth filing | Yes, improve the page |
| Discovered, currently not indexed | Known but not yet crawled | Add internal links, wait |
| Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical | Another page is treated as the original | Yes, if the wrong one won |
| Alternate page with canonical tag | You pointed it elsewhere deliberately | No |
| Page with redirect | It redirects | No |
| Not found (404) | The page is gone | Only if it should exist |
The two that catch people out
Excluded by noindex tag is the one that does real damage. It is what happens when a staging setting reaches production, or an SEO plugin is misconfigured, or a template carries the tag across a whole section. In WordPress, check Settings, Reading for "Discourage search engines", then check your SEO plugin's per-post-type settings.
The signature is a traffic chart that falls vertically on the day of a deploy.
Crawled, currently not indexed is different and more uncomfortable. Nothing is broken. Google read the page and decided it was not worth filing, usually because it is thin, nearly identical to another page, or has no links pointing at it.
The fix is not technical. Make the page genuinely more useful, differentiate it from whatever it resembles, and link to it from pages that are already indexed.
Getting a page indexed
URL Inspection. Paste the URL into the bar at the top of Search Console and click Request Indexing. Useful for a handful of pages, not for hundreds.
Your XML sitemap. Confirm the page is in it and that the sitemap is submitted. Also confirm the sitemap does not list redirected or noindexed URLs, which wastes the signal.
Internal links. The most reliable method. A page linked from your navigation or from a well-indexed page gets found and filed far more readily than an orphan.
Expect a few days to two weeks on an established site. New sites with few links take longer, and no amount of resubmitting speeds it up.
Not everything should be indexed
Thank-you pages, internal search results, tag and author archives, filtered or sorted product URLs, and thin category pages are all better left out. Indexing them dilutes rather than adds.
A site with 30 strong indexed pages outperforms one with 300 weak ones, and recent core updates have been consistent about that.
A monthly habit
Once a month, open the Pages report and check two things: that the indexed count is not falling, and that nothing new has appeared under "Excluded by noindex tag". Two minutes, and it catches the failure that costs the most.
Juicy Designs checks indexing in every SEO audit and monitors it on retainer. See technical SEO. Related: what technical SEO covers and not showing up on Google.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check if Google has indexed all my pages?
Open Google Search Console and go to the Pages report. It lists every URL Google knows about, split into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion. A site: search gives a rough count but the Pages report gives the reasons.
What does 'Crawled - currently not indexed' mean?
Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to file it. It usually means the page is thin, near-duplicate of another page, or not obviously useful. It is a quality signal rather than a technical fault.
How do I get a page indexed faster?
Submit it through URL Inspection in Search Console, make sure it is in your XML sitemap, and link to it from a page that is already indexed. Internal links are the most reliable of the three.
How long should indexing take?
A few days to two weeks for a new page on an established site. New sites with few links can take considerably longer, and there is no way to buy priority.
Should all my pages be indexed?
No. Thank-you pages, internal search results, tag archives and duplicate filtered URLs are better left out. A smaller set of strong indexed pages beats a large set of weak ones.