Indexable, not indexed: honest wording for an SEO tool

I maintain an SEO product whose domain name contains the word "PageRank". That creates an awkward temptation, because the thing people most often want from a site called PageRank Status is a PageRank number, and there is no honest way to give them one. This post is about the wording rules the project follows because of that, and why I think they make the product better rather than weaker.

There is no PageRank score to show

Google stopped showing PageRank publicly in 2016, and there has never been a public API for it. Any tool that displays a "PageRank" today is showing its own invented metric under a borrowed name.

So the first rule in the project's rules file is blunt: never fabricate a "weight". PageRank Status does not show a PageRank score, an estimated PageRank, or a proprietary number dressed up to look like one. When the extension grades a page, it shows a 0–100 score and an A–E grade that come from checks it can explain — metadata, headings, images, links, structured data, technical basics — and each issue comes with the reason it was flagged.

That is less exciting than a mysterious authority number. It is also something a user can act on.

"Indexable" is not "indexed"

The second rule is about one word. When the tool looks at whether a page can appear in search, it fetches the page itself and reads what is actually there: the HTTP status, noindex directives in the markup and headers, and whether the canonical points somewhere else.

From that it can say, with confidence, that a page is indexable — nothing on the page prevents a search engine from indexing it.

What it cannot say is that the page is indexed. Only the search engine knows that, and the tool has no first-party data from Google. A page can be perfectly indexable and still not be in the index, for reasons no outside fetch can see. So the product copy, the audit results and the labels in the interface always say "indexable", and results are marked as local checks.

The difference sounds pedantic until someone makes a decision based on it. "Indexed: yes" tells a site owner there is nothing to investigate. "Indexable: yes" tells them the page itself is not the problem, and that the answer to "is it in Google" lives in Search Console.

Don't imply features you don't have

The third rule covers the gaps. The project has no scheduled crawler, no ongoing monitoring of a whole site's sitemap and no daily email report. The rules file says the public pages must not imply any of those exist.

This is harder to follow than it sounds, because SEO marketing copy has a standard vocabulary — "monitor", "track", "stay on top of", "get alerted" — and almost all of it suggests something running in the background. Each of those phrases got checked against what the product actually does. An on-demand audit is described as an audit you run, not as monitoring.

The same thinking applies to outcomes. The copy is written not to promise rankings, traffic, or that AI answer engines will cite you. The GEO features score how ready a page is to be cited and suggest structural improvements; whether an engine cites it is outside anyone's control, and the copy says so by not claiming otherwise.

What honest wording costs, and what it buys

It probably costs something. A tool that shows a big "PageRank: 6" is easier to screenshot and share than one that shows a list of heading-level issues.

What it buys is that nothing on the page has to be walked back. Someone who arrives from a search for PageRank gets a straight explanation of why the number doesn't exist and something useful to do instead, and every claim the product makes can be checked by running it.

If you're building in this space, three questions have been a useful filter for me:

1. Where does this number come from? If the answer is "we made it up", don't show it under someone else's name.
2. Can we observe this, or only infer it? Choose the word that matches — indexable, not indexed.
3. Does this sentence describe something that runs when the user isn't looking? If the product doesn't do that, rewrite the sentence.

PageRank Status and its free Chrome extension are described on the product page, and changes to both show up in the changelog.