In this chapter, we’ll talk about how to make sure your pages are indexed and check how they’re indexed.
Robots directives
A robots meta tag is an HTML snippet that tells search engines how to crawl or index a certain page. It’s placed into the <head> section of a webpage and looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
Canonicalization
When there are multiple versions of the same page, Google will select one to store in its index. This process is called canonicalization and the URL selected as the canonical will be the one Google shows in search results. There are many different signals it uses to select the canonical URL including:
- Canonical tags
- Duplicate pages
- Internal links
- Redirects
- Sitemap URLs
The easiest way to see how Google has indexed a page is to use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. It will show you the Google-selected canonical URL.
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