“Discovered - currently not indexed” means Google knows about the URL but hasn’t yet crawled or indexed it.
Follow this five-step process to diagnose and fix the issue.
1. Request indexing
If you only see a few pages with the “Discovered - currently not indexed” issue, try requesting indexing via Google Search Console (GSC). To do that, click “URL inspection” on the menu and enter the page’s URL. If it’s not currently indexed, hit the “Request indexing” button.
If all is good, you should see a message that the URL was added to the priority crawl queue.
2. Check for crawl budget issues
Crawl budget is how fast and how many pages a search engine wants to crawl on your site. If your crawlable URLs exceed your crawl budget, you may see the “Discovered - currently not indexed” warning.
According to Google’s Gary Illyes, 90% of sites don’t need to worry about it. However, although issues with crawl budgets tend to affect larger sites, specific technical setups, problems, and mistakes can lead to issues on smaller sites.
Let’s look at a few things that can lead to crawl budget issues and how to improve them.
Do you serve content from subdomains?
Let’s say your main website is on example.com, but you have assets on a subdomain such as cdn.example.com. In this case, the asset subdomain may be considered part of your main website and grouped together for the crawl budget.
Consider serving assets from a CDN URL with a separate crawl budget to solve this.
Do you have unnecessary redirects?
Typically, when we decide to remove a page from the website, we add a redirect to another relevant page. However, this isn’t always necessary. Unless the page has backlinks or traffic, it’s better to remove or replace internal links to the deleted page and return a 404.
Do you have duplicate content?
Duplicate content is when you have near or exact copies of pages accessible at multiple URLs. Examples include:
- The same pages are accessible at www and non-www versions of your site, as well as HTTPS and HTTP.
- Development or staging instances.
- Empty product or category pages with boilerplate content.
The way you solve duplicate content issues depends on your circumstances.
Have you used internal nofollow links?
Nofollow links won’t prevent the page from being indexed. However, using them internally tells search engines a page is not important.
Do you have orphan pages?
If the only way to discover your new page is from the sitemap and it has no internal links, Google may consider it unimportant.
3. Check for content quality issues
Google doesn’t index everything it discovers. It prioritizes high-quality, unique, and compelling content. As Google hasn’t yet crawled pages with this warning, it can’t know whether the content is low quality or not. However, it may have an idea based on similar pages that it’s already crawled—which is why it may have “deprioritized” crawling.
Here are a few types of content Google is unlikely to index:
- Machine-translated content – The translations will be far from perfect if you use Google’s Translate API or similar to localize content. In which case, it’s not particularly useful to searchers.
- Spun content – This is where you use software to rewrite content. The result is almost always low-quality, plagiarized content.
- AI-generated content – AI writing tools are gaining popularity, but they rarely create useful content without human involvement.
Thin content – These are pages without much unique content.
4. Check that content is internally linked
Internal links are links from one page on your website to another. Google often sees URLs without any or many internal links as unimportant and may not index them.
5. Check backlinks
Backlinks are one of the signals Google uses to decide whether a page is likely to be valuable and worthy of crawling. If your page has no or few high-quality backlinks, it may be one of the reasons Google has “deprioritized” crawling.
Getting more backlinks is probably the hardest of all the listed, but it does pay off. Even one valuable link can help Google discover your content and index it faster.
Content Source: ahrefs.com
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