Chapter 1 of 5 · SEO for Thai Websites — Getting Google to Find, Understand and Choose Your Pages

How Google works, and what Search Console tells you

The three stages every page passes through before it can appear in results — crawling, indexing, serving — the SEO beliefs Google itself says are false, and how to use Search Console to tell why a site is not showing up.

This series is for people who run a website in Thai themselves — a shop, a blog or a news site. Every rule in it cites Google’s own documentation as checked on 24 September 2026, and several examples are mistakes KoishiAI made on this very site. We tell them plainly, because a real mistake shows the point better than a principle does.

1.1 The three stages every page goes through

Before a page can appear in results it passes three stages in order. Stuck at one, the next never happens.

Stage	What Google does	If a page is stuck here
Crawling	Googlebot discovers URLs and fetches pages, rendering JavaScript with a recent Chrome	Google does not know the page exists, or cannot reach it
Indexing	Reads the content, groups duplicates and picks the most representative page of each group (the canonical)	Google has seen the page but does not keep it
Serving	For each search, picks the pages from the index that match best	The page is indexed but no query brings it up

Two sentences from Google’s documentation are worth remembering from the start:

“Indexing isn’t guaranteed.” Not every page Google processes is kept.
Google does not accept payment to rank pages higher; ranking is done programmatically. Anyone selling “guaranteed Google rankings” is selling something nobody can sell.

1.2 SEO beliefs Google says are not true

A lot of SEO advice, in Thai and English alike, still repeats rules that Google’s own starter guide contradicts. Check an idea against this table before spending effort on it.

Belief	What Google writes
You need meta keywords	Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag
Articles need at least X words	Length alone does not matter for ranking; there is no magic word count
Headings must go H1, H2, H3 in strict order	Heading order and number do not matter to Google Search
The domain must contain the keyword	Words in the domain or path have hardly any effect beyond breadcrumbs
E-E-A-T is a ranking factor	Google’s answer: “No, it’s not”
Duplicate content gets penalised	The same content under several URLs of your own site is inefficient, not a cause for a manual action; copying other people’s content is a different matter
Repeating keywords helps	Keyword stuffing is against Google’s spam policies

What is left once these are set aside is what this series covers: making pages crawlable, making them understandable, and writing what people actually search for.

1.3 How long changes take

Google says “some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months”, and a page of low importance may wait months before Googlebot revisits it.

So do not change several things at once and judge the result after a week — you will not know what worked. Change one thing, write down the date, and look at Search Console over a long window.

1.4 Search Console: the engine room

Search Console is Google’s free tool showing how Google sees your site. You verify ownership first. Three reports do most of the work.

Performance

Figure	Meaning
Impressions	How often a link to your site appeared in results; some result types count only once scrolled or expanded into view
Clicks	How often someone clicked through from Google to your site
CTR	Clicks divided by impressions
Average position	Your topmost position for each query, averaged; 1 is the top

Read the four together. High impressions with a low CTR means people see you but do not want to click — the title or description is the problem. Impressions near zero means the problem is earlier: the page is not indexed or matches no query yet.

Page indexing

This report shows which stage each page is stuck at. The statuses small sites meet most often:

Status	Meaning	What to do
Discovered - currently not indexed	Google knows the URL but rescheduled the crawl to avoid overloading the site	Mostly wait, and make sure internal links reach the page
Crawled - currently not indexed	Read but not kept; it may be indexed later	Google says there is no need to resubmit; ask whether the page is valuable enough or duplicates another
Duplicate without user-selected canonical	A duplicate of another page, and you did not say which one is the main one, so Google chose	State the canonical clearly (chapter 2)
Alternate page with proper canonical tag	This page correctly points its canonical at the main page	Nothing to do
URL marked ‘noindex’	Google found noindex and did not index	Remove noindex if you want the page indexed
Blocked by robots.txt	robots.txt forbids fetching	If you really want the page out of results, use noindex instead (chapter 2)
Soft 404	The page says “not found” but returns status 200	Return a real 404 for pages that do not exist

URL Inspection

Enter one URL to see whether it is in Google and which page Google chose as canonical. The live test checks the page as it is now, but only for technical problems: Google says a pass means the page can probably be indexed, and that the test does not check quality or security guidelines. Passing is not a promise.

Request indexing only puts the URL in a queue, has a daily quota, and Google states plainly that it does not guarantee the page will be indexed. Pressing it every day does nothing extra.

1.5 A lesson from KoishiAI: quiet does not mean banned

For a while this site got almost no visitors from Google. The first thought was a penalty. But inspecting pages one by one with URL Inspection showed that every page Google had fetched was allowed by robots.txt, indexable, and had the canonical we set. The real problem was that Google hardly came to crawl, because the site was young and some internal links led the crawler to the wrong places (more in chapter 2).

How to tell why a site is quiet:

Open Page indexing and see which status most pages are in.
Inspect your important pages with URL Inspection: status, canonical and last crawl date.
Separate two cases. If pages are not being crawled, or crawled rarely, Google is not interested enough to fetch them yet: work on internal links, a correct sitemap, and content people want to link to. If pages are indexed but get no clicks, the problem is at the serving stage: they match no query people type, or others answer it better (chapters 3 and 5).

Manual actions have their own report in Search Console, called Manual actions. A green check mark there means no manual action on the site. It does not rule out everything: Google also demotes spam automatically, and those algorithmic actions do not appear in that report. So a green check plus pages that are indexed and match searches is good evidence the site is not being held back — a green check alone is not.

1.6 After this chapter

Verify your site in Search Console if you have not.
Open Page indexing and note which status most pages are in.
Pick your 5 most important pages and inspect each with URL Inspection.
Stop spending effort on the myths in table 1.2. One note on E-E-A-T: it is not a single ranking factor, but Google says its systems use a mix of factors that identify content with good experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, weighted more for topics like health and money. The qualities still matter; the label is not a box to tick.

The next chapter goes into the first stage: getting Google to find and keep the pages you want, and not the ones you do not.