This is probably SEO 101 but often even those who do SEO every day, they are so in the weeds that the basics kind of slip away. Martin Splitt of Google summed it up by saying just because Google may crawl a page, it does not mean that page will be in Google's index. Also just because a page is in its index, it does not mean it will rank in Google Search.
And again: Crawling doesn't imply indexing and even indexing doesn't imply showing up in SERPs.
— Martin Splitt @ home 🏡🇨🇭 (@g33konaut) October 22, 2020
He also framed it like this just before:
Ah you see
— Martin Splitt @ home 🏡🇨🇭 (@g33konaut) October 22, 2020
1) Crawling doesn't mean it's getting indexed (see "Crawled but not indexed" in GSC)
2) If it's indexed but not ranking, who cares?
3) If it's secret, why do you have it on a public site, hidden or not...
Why did he say it? Well, just because Google can crawl a link in commented out HTML code, it doesn't mean it will index or rank that link.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
