What is the difference between crawling, indexing, and ranking?

Think of it as three simple steps: crawling means Google discovers the page, indexing means Google adds and understands the page in its database, and ranking means Google decides where the page should appear in the search results.
 
Crawling is when Google discovers and reads your page.

Indexing is when it decides to store that page in its search database. Ranking is where that indexed page is placed in the search results for a query.
 
What is the difference between crawling, indexing, and ranking?
Crawling means that your site has been discovered by google. Indexing is google knowing the page and ranking is when a page appears on search results on google.
 
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