It’s common to see the Crawled – currently not indexed notice in Google Search Console (GSC) for websites, and it is not a big thing, and it is really easy to fix.
This not indexed data in GSC is 2 days old so have some patience 😅 If you are an SEO or if you are a Business Owner, don’t be furious with your SEO Team. 😅
This happens when Google’s bots crawl your pages but doesn’t index them. GSC will never show you why because that’s up to us to think.
To solve this, ensure your website has a proper internal linking structure, submit a sitemap through GSC, and inspect URLs for any crawl errors in Google Search Console.
You can use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for specific pages. Google allows 10 requests per user in 24 hours, but requesting indexing more often doesn’t guarantee faster indexing.
In this article, you can learn how to fix “crawled – currently not indexed” besides fixing “discovered – currently not indexed” as well.
Table of Contents
Crawled vs Discovered
While we are hoping on the topic, you should know there’s a major difference between the two.
“Crawled – currently not indexed” indicates that your pages have been examined by Google’s bots, yet they haven’t been included in the search index. They might be added to the index later on.
Whereas, Search Engine Land stated, “Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google has identified your page’s URL existence but hasn’t crawled or indexed it yet.
This delay in crawling could be due to concerns about overloading your site, so Google has postponed the crawl for a later time.
How to Fix Discovered – Currently Not Indexed
For “Discovered – currently not indexed” notices, focus on improving the page’s content and quality, and ensure it’s not blocked by robots.txt or ‘no index’ tags.
Whatever your website’s tech stack is, if it is a WordPress website, you can visit Page Source and find “<meta name=”robots” content=”follow, index” if this is like nofollow,noindex or follow,noindex, it is a problem. Ask your developer to make it follow,index.
If it is a shopify website, go to Google Search Console, inspect the URL and test live URL. It will look like below:
If it shows URL can be indexed, there is nothing wrong there. It will show like this:
Remember that patience is key, as it might take some time for Google to index your pages. It typically takes a week for most high-quality content to get indexed as presented by Story Chief Insights.
Continuously monitor GSC and implement essential optimizations to enhance indexing performance. One of our blog links was indexed after a month and there was not a single mistake that we did, and it took its time to index. That is perfectly fine. 😊
In my personal experience with ecommerce websites, what worked was just to submit the URLs manually for Request Indexing and after 24 hours, they got indexed. I am still curious, why Google was able to index it itself? And that worked for me. Do try it and let me know if it worked for you too by mentioning me on Twitter.
How to Fix Crawled – Currently Not Indexed in 3 Easy Steps?
After you have exported all the URLs in a sheet. Let me explain in 3 easy steps:
- Open Search Console
- Inspect the URL and wait till you see Request Indexing option
- Press Request Indexing
Sometimes, Google Search Console indexes a page using this method and sometimes it takes longer. Your URLs will be crawled within a week or so. We cannot tell how much time Google Crawler will take. It is totally uncertain.
What is False positive in Google Search Console?
When you use the URL inspection tool or test the live URL and it appears that your page is indexed, it is referred to as a false positive from Google Search Console. According to Google Search Console Help article, this situation is seen as a false positive.
How to Test a Live URL for False Positive in GSC:
Follow the below steps to test a Live URL for False Positive in GSC:
- Enter the URL of your page to inspect in Search Console
- For instance, take the example of this blog: https://seo-bulletin.com/seo/discovered-crawled-currently-not-indexed-in-gsc-fixed/
- Next, using site:https://seo-bulletin.com/seo/discovered-crawled-currently-not-indexed-in-gsc-fixed/
Even if Google Search Console indicates that your blog is not indexed, itcan be indexed, if it is still indexed if it shows up in the search results. We refer to this as a false positive. Why? Because Search Console is saying it CAN BE INDEXED. In English, “it can be indexed” and is indexed have different meaning.
In this case, there is nothing you need to do because this is merely a GSC reporting delay and you can verify this by matching the current date and the date the data is showing on as seen in the image below:
What we mean is google search console is not a Real-time data like Google Analytics 4, it takes some days to show data but is always behind time.
How do you index a website on Google?
You can index a website on Google is by request indexing in Google Search Console.
This is Muhammad Asad. I like to play table tennis and love Digital Marketing and SEO. I have more 7 years of Digital Marketing experience. I would love to chat.