Search and the web
The share of the pages you published that a search engine has actually stored — and a gap between the two is ordinary rather than a fault.
Also called Indexed pages · Покрытие индекса
Formula
Index coverage = Pages indexed ÷ Pages submitted
- Pages indexed
- pages the engine has stored and is willing to return, per its own report
- Pages submitted
- the count in your sitemap, which is what you asked it to consider
Both figures come from the same report, so the ratio is meaningful. A count taken from the site: operator instead is an estimate the engine explicitly declines to stand behind, and mixing the two produces a coverage figure that is not a ratio of anything.
The number worth watching is not the ratio but the reasons behind the shortfall, and the report gives them. A page excluded by a canonical, a redirect or a noindex was excluded because you said so. A page crawled and rejected is an editorial judgement about the page. A page discovered and never fetched is neither — it is a statement about how much attention the site is currently worth.
Coverage also moves without anyone touching the site. Engines drop pages that go unqueried for long enough, and re-add them when demand appears. A drop of a few per cent across a month, with no change in the reasons, is the index breathing.
- Pages submitted in the sitemap
- 103
- Indexed
- 87
- Discovered, not yet crawled
- 16
- Redirects, deliberate
- 5
- Not found, historical
- 2
- Crawled and not indexed
- 1
Coverage 84.5%. The sixteen in the largest category have never been fetched — Google knows the address from the sitemap and has not spent the request. On a domain three weeks old that is a budget decision rather than a defect, and the only remedies are age, links and time.
It is the category with no technical remedy, and the one most often sold as one. The page is reachable, allowed, and known; the engine has decided it is not yet worth a request. Rewriting titles and resubmitting sitemaps does not change that decision, and a supplier billing to fix it monthly is billing for the passage of time.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.