Before you change anything, find out whether Google actually has your page. It is the one check that decides which half of the problem you are in, and it takes ten seconds.

How do I check if my page is indexed by Google?

Search Google for site: followed by the exact URL, for example site:yourdomain.com/about. If the page comes back, it is indexed. For a definitive answer, paste the URL into the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console: it reports whether the URL is in the index, when it was last crawled, and if it is excluded, the specific reason why.

Those two checks are ordered deliberately. The site: search takes ten seconds and needs no setup, so it is the right first move. URL Inspection needs Search Console and gives you the reason rather than the symptom, so it is the right second move when the answer is no.

What does the site: search actually show?

It lists pages Google has indexed from that domain or path. It is a quick indicator rather than a precise inventory — the result count is an estimate and can vary between searches, so it answers "is anything indexed" well and "exactly how many pages" badly. Use it for the yes-or-no, and use Search Console when you need real numbers.

People trip over this by treating the count as an inventory. Watching it go from 412 to 388 and starting an investigation is usually chasing an estimate that was never precise. Real page-level numbers live in the Pages report in Search Console, which also tells you why each excluded URL was excluded.

Why does Google show a different number of pages than my sitemap?

Almost always because the two are measuring different things. Your sitemap lists the pages you want indexed; the index contains the pages Google chose to keep. Duplicates, thin pages, pages excluded by a noindex tag and pages Google has not got to yet all create a gap, and a gap is normal. A gap that is growing, or that includes pages you care about, is worth investigating.

There is a second, more embarrassing reason the numbers disagree, and it is worth ruling out first: the sitemap may be wrong. Sitemaps drift quietly, listing URLs that now redirect, 404 or carry a noindex tag — so part of the "missing" pages were never real candidates. TrustCtrl checks the URLs in your sitemap on each crawl and reports which are unreachable, blocked from indexing or never crawled, which turns a mysterious gap into a list. More in your sitemap is probably lying.

The three reasons a page is not indexed

  • Google cannot fetch it. Blocked in robots.txt, behind a login, or answering an error. The crawler never got the content.
  • Google was told not to index it. A noindex tag, or a canonical tag pointing at a different URL, which asks Google to index that one instead.
  • Google fetched it and chose not to keep it. The hardest case, and the most common on larger sites. Usually a near-duplicate of another page, or so thin that indexing it adds nothing. URL Inspection names this explicitly rather than leaving you to guess.

A fourth possibility looks like all three and is none of them: the page renders fine in your browser but arrives at the crawler empty, because the content is assembled by JavaScript after load. Covered in the content Google cannot see.

My page is indexed but still gets no traffic. Why?

Because indexing and ranking are separate. Being in the index means Google is willing to show the page; whether it shows it to anyone depends on whether the page is a good answer to something people search for, and on who else is competing. An indexed page with no impressions in Search Console is usually targeting a query nobody makes, or is being beaten by pages that answer it better.

Impressions are the number to look at here, and they split the diagnosis cleanly. Zero impressions means you are not being shown at all — a relevance problem. Plenty of impressions and few clicks means you are being shown and passed over — a title and description problem, and a much cheaper one to fix. The rest of the numbers are in the Search Console guide.