Crawled – currently not indexed is an important Google index coverage issue that must fix depending on the priority. Various factors contribute to this issue, with different priority levels to improve.
Many webmasters take this coverage issue on the higher side, but the impacts are high regarding crawl budget, indexing, and ranking.
The goal of every SEO professional will be to index the web pages rapidly and rank them on the search engine result page (SERP).
What if your web pages are not indexed?
Your quality content, research, etc., go in vain.
This index coverage issue is one of the vital checklists we usually audit in our technical SEO process.
This article will bring you a complete guide on what this issue is all about and how to fix them.
What is Crawled - Currently not Indexed?
This Google index coverage issue states that Googlebot could,
- Discover your web pages.
- Crawl the complete web pages (up to 15 MB)
- Render the contents of the web pages.
But, fail to index the web pages for many reasons. We will be enlarging on both the reason and solution part later in this content.
As per Google or other search engines’ ethics, indexing is their choice. It is not mandated for Google to index your web pages post request indexing through URL inspection in the Google search console.
Post rendering, Google undergoes multiple checklists as per their algorithm, and ranking factors to set a canonical URL.
If a web page doesn’t meet webmaster quality guidelines, the chance of not-indexing or de-indexing is high.
How to find the pages that are Crawled - Currently Not Indexed?
Google search console, a free technical SEO tool by Google helps us to identify these errors. To check what are the web pages comes under crawled – currently not indexed.
Follow these steps,
Step 1 – Login to Google search console, and choose your property.
Step 2 – In the left side, you will be provided with multiple options, click on coverage, that comes under index.
Step 3 – In the coverage section, you would get the dashboard with 4 options to look at (Error, Valid with warning, Valid, Excluded).
Step 4 – Click on Excluded, then scroll down to check all the reasons of web pages excluded from indexing.
Step 5 – Just click on the option crawled currently not indexed, you will be provided with the web pages that are excluded for this reason.
What are the Reasons for Crawled - Currently Not Indexed?
Just like the other Google index coverage issue discovered – currently not indexed, this coverage issue too backed by multiple reasons.
Some times, Google might take actions on the web pages that are indexed earlier.
Here are the reason, that could stop your web pages from indexing post discovering, crawling, and rendering.
- Excluded by Robots tag.
- Keyword Cannibalization.
- Crawl Errors
- Duplicate Content.
- Thin and Low Quality Content.
- Improper Internal Linking, and Orphaned page
- Backlinks from spammy websites.
- Google penalty
Usually, when a web page is marked noindex under robots tag, your web page can get this Google index issues.
‘Noindex’ robots tag command informs search engines to exclude from indexing.
Generally details or pages with internal confidential content, tags, terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc.
If you find any other pages, that are important to be indexed in search engines, then, you have to change noindex to index.
When two or more web pages have the same search intent, it is termed as keyword cannibalization. Google will be confused about which page to rank, and it excludes all the pages with the same intent from indexing.
Keyword cannibalization is an act of competition between internal web pages, which holds a high chance of web pages being excluded under crawled – currently not indexed.
Some times, your web pages won’t be indexed due to crawl budget. To manage the crawl budget, you should check the crawl errors in Google search console.
As per the above image, Go to settings in Google search console, and you can find Crawl Stats.
Click on Open Report, you will be getting all the details of the status of HTTP response.
In this, status codes like 200, 304 are good URL. Sometimes, you can be ok with redirects like 301 and 302.
The error part comes when you have webpages with HTTP status code 404 (not found), other internal issues 4xx, and server issues 5xx.
These issues consume a lot crawl budget, that takes lot of time to crawl a new valuable web page, as crawl budget would have vanished.
Duplicate Content:
When you have same content across different web pages of your website, without a proper canonical tag, it becomes a duplicate content.
Under this case, Google will tag all the duplicate web pages as crawled – currently not indexed.
Our best advise would be to avoid using same content for any other web pages, show uniqueness and relevancy of the web page.
Still, if you require to copy the same content (franchise, multiple-location businesses), use proper canonical tag to avoid exclusion from indexation.
Thin or Low Quality Content:
Often pages with thin or low quality contents are mapped under crawled – currently not indexed.
Thin content is when you have very low content less than 600 words in a web page.
Low quality contents are when your web pages are build by AI, auto-generated, cloaking, keywords stuffing, irrelevant intent in web page, etc.
Improper Internal Link Planning and Orphan Pages
Your webpages would have discovered, and crawled by search engines through sitemap. But, if the web page is not referred from internal web pages, then the chance of indexing goes to zero.
You often see orphan pages in the coverage issue crawled currently not indexed.
To avoid this, plan your site architecture, and internal link each relevant pages.
How to fix Crawled Currently Not Indexed Issue?
There are multiple ways to fix this issue, and we provide some priority levels with different types of URLs.
Prior looking at the recovery, you should do this to check, when did Googlebot crawled this web page the last time.
As shown in the above image, please place the URL (that are excluded from indexing post crawling) in URL inspection of Google search console.
You will get these details, as URL is not on Google with exact status on coverage crawled currently not indexed, with last crawl date.
Once you have done that, then you should follow the upcoming ways to fix this coverage issue,
False Positives
Low priority
This case is when, your Google search console says that the web page is crawled currently not indexed. But, your web pages are visible in search engine result page.
How that is possible, and how to check a web page is a false positives of not indexed?
For an example, if you need to check the indexation station of the webpage https://the7eagles. com/discovered-currently-not-indexed/
Take this URL, and place in search engine bar with site: placed before the URL.
If you see your web page visible in SERP (search engine result page), then do nothing. This is known as false positives.
Give some more time to Google search console to solve by itself. The good news here is your web page is already indexed.
You can just request manual indexing in Google search console to speed up the process. Still, Google takes the decision.
How to fix URLs with /feed/?
Neither do URL inspection and Manual request for indexing nor remove the URL.
These webpages will be navigated to xml documents that is important for RSS feed, and not for Google index.
How to fix URLs with Pagination?
Low Priority
This is quite common issue of crawled – currently not indexed. Highly seen in e-commerce or website with high number of pages. Search engines crawl large pages website with the help of pagination.
To resolve number of pagination URLs from excluded section. Then you should build with proper architecture, and internal links so crawling becomes feasible for search engine.
Besides this make sure, your paginations are free from noindex tag (when you have e-commerce or news website), and contains self-referring canonical tag.
So, when you see these type of URL under crawled – currently not indexed, then do nothing. Go to bed, just relax.
If you still think on saving crawl budgets from pagination, then block the pagination URLs from Robots.txt
How to fix URLs with Redirects?
High Priority
This is an important issue to be given high focus. SEO professionals usually do a redirect when creating a destination page instead of an existing page.
This helps to transfer both traffic and authority to the destination page. Still, the redirected web page rents in the Google Index.
Redirect URLs consumes more crawl budget. That too when a page has multiple redirects, the consumption of crawling increases.
We advise you not to change the URL of any web pages. If you are changing the URL for the case of SEO optimization, then you should use 410 command for redirecting URL, and start indexing the destination URL.
Yes, you will loose authority that has build in the existing page. Yet, that’s the best way of resolving this use, as the redirecting URL will be still in index database for crawling, with no content.
So, it will keep the redirecting URL or destination URL in crawled – currently not indexed.
Just use 410 command to the redirecting URL and move on, this issue will resolve soon.
How to fix Pages with Thin or Low Quality Content?
High Priority
When we do SEO audits, we find this error quite often. This error can even de-index the web pages that are indexed in earlier episodes of crawling.
This issues can be fixed, and are High priority to fix for indexing them.
Just update content of the web page. If you find this a tedious process, you can get our content writers to work on that.
We will work on 10x content strategy, and make relevant, freshness, and content matching to your competitor in the 1st page of SERP.
Always focus on quality contents. Your content should be a solution to your audience query. So, never engage in building content with
- AI tools
- Auto Generating Programs
- Bot contents
- Copy Content
- Cloaking Contents
Looking to Fix Crawled – Currently Not Indexed? You’re just away from a mail!!!
Conslusion:
- Crawled currently not indexed is one of the Google Index coverage issue, that affects indexing of any web page.
- This can harm your potential page from indexing.
- This issue can be caused by various factors like thin content, duplicate content, improper internal links, excluded by robots tag, etc.
- Focus on providing valuable content, and don’t duplicate, these are the best way to fix this google coverage issue.
- If you find this process a tedious, you can hire us for technical SEO services.
