Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Mandeep, who is having trouble with indexing on their site.
Mandeep asks:
“We have redesigned a website and we had added a few new pages. Some pages were indexed successfully and some were not.
I tried multiple times on Google but that is not working. Now, while I submit the URL to index, it is showing this error via Google Search Console: Discovered – currently not indexed […]
I have tried everything but nothing is working. Please help me resolve this issue.”
This warning is coming from the “Pages” section of the “Indexing” report in Google Search Console. This report gives users insight into what pages Google has crawled and indexed and the problems it may have encountered doing so.
The report will give details of pages that have been successfully crawled and indexed. It also lists reasons why the pages on the site have not been indexed.
Is It A Problem If A Page Isn’t Indexed?
Most sites have pages that are not indexed. These are oftentimes at the request of the website owner.
For example, a page might be deliberately excluded from the search engine indexes by way of an HTML “noindex” tag on the page, or perhaps it is being blocked from crawling in the robots.txt file.
URLs that have been purposely excluded from indexing will appear within this report, as well as pages with problematic indexing issues.
In general, it can take some time for a new page on a website to be crawled and indexed. A new page taking time to show up among the “indexed” pages on the report is not always a sign of an issue.
Not every reason within the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report needs to be addressed.
Indexing Issues
Google will not crawl and index every URL it finds. Your main concern as a website manager is that the pages that you wish to be available as a search result are indexed.
Essentially, if they are not indexed, they will not be eligible to be a search result.
There are several reasons within the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report that do suggest an issue on the site that should be investigated. For example, “Server error (500)” and “Soft 404.”
These flags may not necessarily be a problem for the individual URLs if they aren’t ones you want to have indexed, but they can indicate a wider issue with the site.
What Is “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed”?
“Discovered – currently not indexed” is an error that Google flags for URLs that it knows about but has not indexed.
What is important to remember is that URLs will not appear in this bucket if they can fit within another in the report.
For example, a page with a noindex tag may technically have been discovered by Google and not indexed, but it would appear in the “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” bucket, so pages within the “Discovered – currently not indexed” bucket are there for another reason.
The explanation Google gives for a URL appearing as “Discovered – currently not indexed” is:
“The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.”
Google tries to make its bots crawl conscientiously.
That is, as Googlebot is not the only visitor to a site, and maybe one among many bots crawling it, it doesn’t want to crash the site by sending too many “requests” to the server.
What Might Be Causing A URL To Be “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed”?
There are two main reasons a page is known to Google but not indexed. John Muller gave details about these in 2023.
Essentially, alongside the concerns around the server’s capacity to withstand crawling, page quality is also considered.
Now, if a page has not been crawled, how can Google know its quality? Well, it can’t. What it can do is make assumptions based on the quality of the pages elsewhere on the site.
That’s right – thin, duplicate, low-value pages elsewhere on your website can affect the indexation of your core pages.
How To Fix The Issue
There is no quick fix to move a page from “Discovered – currently not indexed” to “Indexed,” but there are several solutions you can try.
Check If The Page Is Actually Indexed
The first port of call is to determine if the Google Search Console report is accurate and up to date.
In the top right-hand corner of the report, you will see the “Last updated” date. This gives you an idea of whether the report might be outdated.
Next, go to Google and perform a site:[yourwebsitedomain] inurl:[the URL slug of the page you want to index] search.
If the page is returned as a search result, then you know it is actually indexed.
Give the report some time to get updated, and it will start appearing under the “Indexed” section and not in the “Discovered – currently not indexed” report.
Check Your Site’s Page Quality
Next, you may want to consider the overall quality of your website, as this could be the reason why Google is not indexing your page.
Remember, quality is not just a measure of the words on your site, their relevance to search queries, and the overall “E-E-A-T” displayed. Instead, Google’s John Muller described it as:
“When it comes to the quality of the content, we don’t mean like just the text of your articles.