Google: Technically Indexed vs Practically Indexed

John Mueller of Google wrote something on Twitter that caught my scrutinize (successfully, every little thing he writes on Twitter catches my scrutinize but this one more than others). He said “Yeah, the distinction between technically listed, and nearly listed is tricky.” So I asked John to expose the distinction.

Properly, each are undoubtedly and “technically” listed but even even supposing they are each listed, the “technically listed” one is now not undoubtedly visible in search however the nearly listed one is visible in search.

John outlined it as “Listed & nearly viewed in recurring search results vs now not viewed. It comes up in overall with extinct / eradicated content, region-moves, robotted URLs, etc. Technically it will likely be listed, but is it well price the time to fix something no one sees & which would now not trigger issues?”

Vanessa Fox, faded Googler, outlined it as “No longer to insist for John (obvs) but while a blocked URL might per chance honest also be technically listed, microscopic or no is known concerning the page. Google will usually own to rank a page it knows has real relevance and price (which requires Google to own crawled the page content).”

I preferrred by no technique heard any individual exhaust the words nearly vs technically listed earlier than – so I figured I could share it if it comes up on your future conversations, you will know what they are talking about.

Dialogue board dialogue at Twitter.