Google Search Console

“Crawled – currently not indexed”: meaning and how to fix it

What it means

Google crawled the page and decided not to index it, for now. There is no technical error: it is a quality or usefulness judgement.

Is it a problem?

It is a problem when it affects pages you want to rank. Google often re-evaluates these, but rarely without a change on your side.

Common causes

• Thin content or content very similar to other pages (on your site or elsewhere)
• The page answers a query another page of yours already covers
• Low perceived value: boilerplate product or tag pages, auto-generated text
• Few or no internal links pointing to it

How to fix it

1. Make the page clearly more useful than what already ranks: unique information, examples, data
2. Merge near-duplicate pages into one stronger page and redirect the rest
3. Add internal links from related, indexed pages with descriptive anchor text
4. If the page has no reason to be in Google, add noindex and stop worrying about it

How to check the fix

Request indexing in URL Inspection after a substantial improvement. Re-requesting an unchanged page does nothing.

All indexing statuses

• Discovered – currently not indexed
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical
• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
• Alternate page with proper canonical tag
• Page with redirect
• Not found (404)