Pages of your website are indexed by the crawler to save in its database. This saving process is called indexing. There may be hundreds of pages on your website. But every page will be indexed, it can’t be assured. To check the indexing status we use this command, “site:example.com”. This command is used to check even the correctness of keyword mapping.
Indexing is a key process, until it is done you can’t get your website ranked. This is the first thing to bring your website to the search engine result page.
A page is indexed by Google if it has been visited by the Google crawler (“Googlebot”), analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. Indexed pages can be shown in Google Search results (if they follow Google’s webmaster guidelines). While most pages are crawled before indexing, Google may also index pages without access to their content (for example, if a page is blocked by a robots.txt directive)
Source: Google’s definition of Indexing
How to Check Indexed Pages
Indexed pages can be seen in the Google Search Console. But you can check your own website’s indexed pages using the search console. If you want to see the numbers of your competitors, use the following search operator.
site:example.com (replace the example.com with domain name)
A
Source: Google’s document on site operatorsite:query is a search operator that allows you to request search results from the particular domain, URL, or URL prefix specified in the operator.
Restrict Bot to Index
There might be some content you would not want to get indexed. Like archive pages of your WordPress site, tags pages, order confirmation pages and cart pages of e-commerce website, etc. You can instruct the crawler bot to not index such pages by using a robots tag.
Syntax of Robots tag
This tag is placed in the head section.
//To restrict Google Bot// <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> //To restrict all bots// <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
You can prevent a page or other resource from appearing in Google Search by including a
Source: Google’s article on noindexnoindexmeta tag or header in the HTTP response. When Googlebot next crawls that page and sees the tag or header, Googlebot will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.