Discovered Currently Not Indexed: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Website Noticed

 

 

Google’s documentation defines the Discovered Currently Not Indexed status in Google’s Index Coverage report as:

 “This page was found by Google but has not yet been crawled. Typically, Google wants to crawl a URL, but this overloads the site; so Google reschedules the crawl. That’s why the last crawl date is empty in the report.

Source: Google’s Index Coverage Report”

Most common indexing issues shown in Google Search Console and found that – Currently Not Indexed is one of them, right next to:

• Duplicate content,

• crawled – currently not indexed,

• soft 404 and

• Crawling issues.

 

Fixing the Discovered Currently Not Indexed issue should be a priority as it affects many pages and indicates that some of your pages have not yet been crawled and subsequently indexed.

This issue can be caused by many factors, and if left unaddressed, could result in some pages never being included in Google’s index. If this is the case, they will not bring you organic traffic and drive any conversions.

This article dives into the Discovered – Currently Not Indexed section of Search Console’s Index Coverage report, focusing on why your page got there and how to fix any issues that might be causing it.

 

Where to Find Discovered – Current Not Indexed Status?

 

Discovered Currently Not Indexed is one of the types of issues in the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. This report shows the crawling and indexing status of pages on your site.

Discovered currently not indexed appears in the Excluded category, which includes URLs that Google has not yet indexed, but from Google’s perspective, this is not a false result.

 

When using Google Search Console, you can click on an issue type to see a list of affected URLs.

 

You may find that you intend to keep some reported URLs out of the index – and that’s fine. But you should monitor your valuable pages – if any of them are not being indexed, check what Google has found.

 

How To Rank Url On Google?

 

Before moving on to the characteristics of Discovered – currently not indexed and addressing this issue, let’s clarify what it takes to rank a URL on Google:

• Google needs to find a URL before it can crawl it. URLs are most often discovered via internal or external links or an XML sitemap, which should contain all pages that should be indexed.

• By crawling pages, Google visits them and examines their content. Google doesn’t have the resources to crawl all the pages it finds – a fact that is behind many of the crawling issues sites encounter.

• During indexing, Google extracts page content and evaluates its quality. Getting indexed is necessary to appear in search results and get organic traffic from Google. Indexed pages are evaluated against several ranking factors to determine how they rank in response to search queries that users enter into Google.

 

Getting indexed by Google is challenging due to the limited capacity of its resources, the ever-growing web, and the level of quality Google expects from the pages it indexes.

Many technical and content-related factors can prevent your pages from being crawled or indexed.

 

There are solutions to increase your chances of being indexed. These Include:

 

• has a crawling strategy that prioritizes crawling valuable parts of the website,

• implement internal linking,

• Create an accurate sitemap that includes all URLs that should be indexable, and

• Write high-quality, valuable content.

Be sure to read Google’s documentation carefully – there’s a section on guidelines to follow to make it easier for Google to crawl and index your pages.

 

How to use the report part titled “Discovered Currently Not Indexed”.

Discovered Currently Not Indexed is the place to stay informed about any potential crawl issues.

After finding the URLs in this section, first, check whether they should be crawled.

If so, try to find a pattern in the URLs that appear in the report. This will help you determine what aspects of these URLs may be causing problems.

For example, the issue could involve URLs in a specific product category, pages with parameters, or pages with a specific structure that cause them to all be considered thin content.

 

When Discovered currently not indexed section requires action?

 

URLs discovered currently not indexed doesn’t always require you to change your website.

That said, you don’t need to take any action if:

• The number of affected URLs is small and stable over time, or

• This report includes URLs that should not be crawled or indexed, such as those with a canonical or “noindex” tag, or those that are blocked in your robots.txt file.

However, it is still crucial to control the section of this report.

If the number of URLs increases, or if they contain valuable URLs that you want to rank and bring you a lot of organic traffic, then these URLs need your attention.

 

Impact of Discovered – Currently Not indexed on Small and large Sites

 

 The impact of the currently non-indexed section can vary by site size.

If you have a small site (typically no more than 10k URLs), and your pages have high-quality, unique content, the “discovered” (currently not indexed) status will usually resolve itself. Google isn’t having any problems, it’s just that the URLs listed haven’t been crawled yet.

Smaller sites often don’t deal with crawl budgets and can experience a surge in reporting pages due to content quality issues or poor internal linking structure.

Discovered currently not indexed status can be particularly severe for large sites (over 10k URLs) and applies to thousands or even millions of URLs.

At Only, we’ve found that sites with more than 100,000 URLs often experience crawling issues, often stemming from wasted crawl budgets.

These problems often occur on e-commerce sites. They often have duplicate or thin content or contain out-of-stock or expired products. Such pages often lack the quality needed to be queued for Google’s index, let alone crawled.

 

when starting a large site!

 

If you’re just launching a large site, you can make Googlebot’s job easier from the start.

If you want to start a large site, if it contains many empty or unfinished pages, then you should not start its entire structure at once, these pages will only be updated later. Googlebot will encounter these pages and consider them to be of low quality, which runs the risk of having a low crawl budget, to begin with. This situation may even take years to resolve.

It’s much better to add content when you post it regularly. This way, Googlebot has a positive impression of your quality from the start.

You should always have an indexing and crawling strategy in place and know which pages Google should visit before launching.

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How To Fix Discovered Currently Not Indexed Issue ?

 

Typically, URLs will be classified as discovered – not currently indexed due to content quality, internal linking, or crawl budget issues.

Let’s consider why your page might be in this state and how to fix it.

 

content quality issues

 

Google has a quality threshold it wants pages to achieve because it can’t crawl and index everything on the web.

Google may deem certain pages on your domain as unworthy of crawling and skip them, prioritizing other, more valuable content. Therefore, these URLs can be marked as discovered – not currently indexed.

To begin troubleshooting this issue, review the list of affected URLs and ensure that each page contains unique content. Content should satisfy a user’s search intent and solve a specific problem.

I recommend that you go through the Quality Rating Guidelines Google follows when evaluating websites – it will help you understand what Google is looking for in content on the web.

 

At the same time, don’t forget that you shouldn’t have all your pages indexed.

Some low-quality pages should not be indexed, such as:

• outdated content (such as old news articles),

• pages generated by the search box within the site,

• Pages generated by applying filters,

• duplicate content,

• automatically generated content,

• User-Generated Content.

It’s best to prevent such sections from being crawled and indexed in your robots.txt file.

 

Internal Linking Issues

 

Googlebot follows internal links on your site to discover other pages and understand how they are connected. So make sure your most important pages are frequently linked internally.

Proper internal linking revolves around connecting your pages to create a logical structure that helps search engines and users follow your site’s hierarchy. Internal linking is also tied to how your site architecture is laid out.

Helping search engines find and assign proper importance to your pages includes:

• Decide what your foundational content is and make sure it links to other pages,

• Add contextual links to your content,

• Link pages based on their hierarchy, for example, by linking parent pages to child pages and vice versa, or by including links in site navigation,

• Avoid spamming links and over-optimizing anchor text,

• Include links to related products or posts.

 

Crawl Budget

 

The crawl budget is the number of pages on your site that Googlebot can and wants to crawl.

A website’s crawl budget is determined by the following factors:

• Crawl Rate Limit – how many URLs Google can crawl, adjusted based on your site’s capabilities,

• Crawl Demand – How many URLs Google wants to crawl, based on how important it is to URLs by looking at their popularity and update frequency.

 

A wasted crawl budget can lead to inefficient crawling of your site by search engines. As a result, some essential parts of your website may be skipped.

Many factors can cause crawl budget issues – they include:

• low-quality content,

• Poor internal link structure,

• Error implementing redirection,

• server overloaded,

• Blockbuster website.

Before optimizing your crawl budget, you should understand how Googlebot crawls your site.

You can do this by navigating to another useful tool in Search Console – the Crawl Statistics Report. Also, check your server logs for details on resources that Googlebot has crawled and skipped.

Here are 5 areas you should consider to optimize your crawl budget and get Google to crawl some of the discovered – currently non-indexed pages on your site:

 

Low-quality content

 

If Googlebot is free to crawl low-quality pages, it may not have the resources to obtain valuable content on your site.

To prevent search engine crawlers from crawling certain pages, apply the correct directives in your robots.txt file.

You should also make sure your site has a properly optimized sitemap to help Googlebot discover unique, indexable pages on your site and notice changes to them.

The sitemap should contain:

• URLs that respond with a 200 status code,

• URLs without a meta robots tag prevent them from being indexed, and

• Only the canonical version of your page.

 

Poor internal link structure

 

If Google doesn’t find enough links to a URL, it may skip crawling it because there aren’t enough signals of its importance.

Follow the guidelines I outlined in the “Internal Linking Issues” subsection.

 

Error implementing redirection

 

Implementing redirects can be beneficial to your website but only if done correctly. Whenever Googlebot encounters a redirected URL, it must send an additional request to reach the target URL, which requires more resources.

Make sure you stick to best practices for implementing redirects. You can redirect users and bots from 404 error pages that have been linked to job pages from external sources, which will help you preserve your ranking signals.

However, make sure that you are not linking to redirected pages – instead, update them so that they point to the correct page. You also need to avoid redirect loops and links.

 

Server Problem

 

Since your site appears to be overloaded, Google may be experiencing crawling issues. This happens because the crawl rate, which affects your crawl budget, is adjusted according to your server capabilities.

Check with your hosting provider if you have any server issues on your site.

Server issues can also be caused by poor network performance

 

Heavy Site

 

Certain pages that are too heavy may cause crawling issues. Google may just not have the resources to crawl and render them.

Every resource that Googlebot needs to fetch to render your page counts toward your crawl budget. In this case, Google sees a page but pushes it into a priority queue.

You should optimize your website’s JavaScript and CSS files to reduce the negative impact of your code.

 

discovered currently not indexed   vs. Crawled currently not indexed

 

These two states are often confused, and although they are related, they have different meanings.

In both cases, the URL is not indexed, however, for Crawled – it is not indexed yet, Google has already visited the page. Discovered Currently not indexed, the page was found by Google but not yet crawled.

Crawled – Current indexing is usually caused by indexing delays, content quality issues, site architecture issues, or the page may have been deindexed. 

 

FAQ about Discovered Currently not Indexed

1. What is an unindexed website?

An unindexed website is a website that has not been added to a search engine’s database. This means that when someone searches for keywords related to the website’s content, the website will not show up in the search results.

2. How is an unindexed website discovered?

An unindexed website can be discovered in a number of ways. It may be found through a manual search, by following a link from another website, or through the use of specialized tools that help identify unindexed websites.

3. Can an unindexed website still be accessed?

Yes, an unindexed website can still be accessed directly by typing in the URL into a web browser or by following a link from another website. However, it will not be found through a search engine.

4. Why would a website be unindexed?

There are several reasons why a website may be unindexed. It may be a new website that has not yet been discovered by search engines, or it may be an older website that has not been updated in a long time and has been removed from search engine databases. In some cases, a website may also be intentionally unindexed by the owner for privacy or other reasons.

5. Can an unindexed website be indexed in the future?

Yes, it is possible for an unindexed website to be indexed in the future. There are a number of steps that website owners can take to improve the chances of their website being indexed, such as submitting their website to search engines and improving the website’s content and structure.

6. Is it Fixable – discovered currently not Indexed?

Yes, it is possible to fix a website that has been discovered as currently not indexed. There are a few different steps that website owners can take to improve the chances of their website being indexed, such as submitting their website to search engines and improving the website’s content and structure. It is also important to regularly update the website and to make sure that it is easily accessible to search engines. If a website has been intentionally unindexed by the owner, they can also choose to resubmit it to search engines for indexing.