"Crawled – currently not indexed": Proven techniques to fix this status

“Crawled – currently not indexed” is one of the most common statuses on Google Search Console, but understanding the underlying causes and how to address them can be challenging.

In this article, I’ll explain the reasons behind this status and provide clear guidance on how to solve "crawled – currently not indexed." But first, let’s discuss what “crawled – currently not indexed” means and how it affects your website.

What does "crawled – currently not indexed" mean?



Google Search Console's “crawled – currently not indexed” status indicates Google crawlers scanned your pages and decided not to include them in their index. While they never mention the reasons for this, we know it has to do with low content quality based on the types of pages they typically exclude.

So, if you publish content that's duplicated from a different website and doesn't provide value to your readers, Google won't index it. Other web pages address the relevant search queries better, and they don’t want to waste their crawl budget or resources indexing yours.

The implications of "crawled – currently not indexed" on your website

It’s normal to have pages that are crawled but not indexed. I've seen this on every site I’ve worked with. However, if over 5% of your pages aren't indexed, Google may see your site as low-quality, which could lead to a loss in rankings and, therefore, traffic.

“Crawled – currently not indexed” vs. “discovered – currently not indexed”



In general, “discovered – currently not indexed” means that your content is even lower quality than “crawled – currently not indexed." It's a red flag for you as a site owner that you need to improve these pages.

Both “discovered – currently not indexed” and “crawled – currently not indexed” indicate that your content isn’t good enough to index. The difference is that Google knows your web pages exist, but they're not even going to crawl them because they know your content is low quality.

» Book a free consultation to fix your indexing.

All the reasons for “crawled – currently not indexed” and how to solve them

There are several reasons why your content may be crawled but not indexed. Let's explore each reason, why it occurs, and how to fix "crawled – currently not indexed."

Poor content quality and inflation

Content quality and inflation of content are some of the main reasons for your content to be in the “crawled – currently not indexed” or “discovered – currently not indexed” statuses.

Low-quality content is essentially content that doesn’t provide the user with a satisfying answer to what they're searching for. Google can identify such content by reading it and recognizing that it's poor. They can also measure high bounce rates or instances where users search again after visiting a page.

Types of low-quality content include:

• Thin content: Pages that don’t provide enough value and in-depth information.
• Duplicated content and cannibalization: Content copied from other websites that doesn't add unique value. You may have duplicate content and keyword cannibalization in multiple places on your website.
• AI-generated content: Content generated by AI without any originality or value added to it.
• Content that doesn’t target search volume: Content that doesn’t target specific search queries or interest users.
• Similar pages: Near identical pages that don’t contain much content (e.g., user profile pages and pages for similar products).
• Spammy content: Content created using manipulative techniques, such as keyword stuffing or scraping content, to artificially boost website rankings.
• Too many ads: Pages containing an unreasonable amount of advertisements, leading to poor user experience.
• Access restrictions or gated content: Content only accessible by performing a specific action, such as providing your email address or paying a fee.
• Automated pages: Pages generated using automation for purposes such as displaying sports scores or scraping content from Amazon are not indexed by Google if each one doesn’t provide significant value. The image below shows an extreme example of such a case.



» Streamline your content creation process with Entail’s headless CMS.

How to fix it

In general, you can solve these issues by ensuring that every piece of content provides value.

If you have many similar pages but there’s justification for having them, consider not indexing every variation. Instead, you can index the overall collection or category page. Alternatively, merge these pages or block them from the index with a noindex tag and robot.txt rule. You may also want to link between these pages.

If your website has duplicate content or cannibalization, use canonical tags to point to the page you want Google to index. Alternatively, you can delete one of the pages or merge them.

To check whether your content effectively targets search volume, take the URLs of your unindexed pages, put them into ChatGPT, and ask it what keywords they target. Then, check if those keywords have volume or what other content ranks for them to see if your content is competitive enough to rank too.

Finally, if you're building pages with automation and want them indexed, you need to make sure of the following:

• Each page should add value to your website and also on the internet. If there are many other alternatives, there's no need for your pages.

• If you're generating content with ChatGPT or Gemini, there's no need to index that content because AI can provide it.

• Pages built with automation should be linked correctly on your website.

Crawl budget issues

Google may not index your content because of crawl budget issues. Crawl budget is a term coined by SEOs that refers to how many resources Google is willing to invest to crawl your website.

If you're a smaller or newer website publishing a lot of content very quickly, you don’t have a very high crawl budget because Google doesn't trust your site yet and won't index all of your content. This, of course, means you'll have pages under “crawled – currently not indexed” or “discovered – currently not indexed” that won’t get organic traffic.

Settings → Crawling → Crawl stats → Open report



Crawl budget issues occur for the following reasons:

• Low domain authority

• Disproportionate rate between crawl budget and content velocity

• A sudden surge in content velocity

• The specific page is too new, and Google hasn't crawled it yet

How to fix it

If you're a new website, you should either publish your content gradually or expect a lot of unindexed pages in the beginning. So, do your math and decide which option is better for you. 

If you're already in this situation, you can reduce the velocity of content creation and ensure proper internal linking between your content pages. At the same time, invest in content quality and show Google you have a trustworthy website to increase your domain authority and crawl budget.

Technical SEO and overall site health

Some reasons for Google’s crawled, not indexed status may be related to technical SEO and other factors affecting your site’s health, like:

• Poor user experience: Pages or elements that load slowly or incorrectly on desktop and mobile devices, leading to bad user experience.
• Soft 404 errors: This happens when Google tries to crawl a website, and it returns a page that doesn't exist.
• No proper sitemap.xml: Without a proper sitemap, Google finds it more difficult to reach certain pages.
• Canonical tags: If your website's canonical tags aren't properly done, Google won't know which pages to give authority. This can also affect your website's crawl coverage.
• Redirect loops: A series of redirects that send traffic from one page to another in an infinite loop.
• Missing meta titles, meta descriptions, and schema markup: Not providing the information that helps Google understand what a page is about.

How to fix it

Site health encompasses many factors, so make sure everything on your site is working well. Regularly check the “crawled – currently not indexed” report in Google Search Console, determine the reasons your pages aren't indexed, and decide how you want to take action.

After you fix those issues, you can click “request indexing” or “validate fix” to see if Google is willing to re-crawl these pages. Then, keep track of these pages to see whether they disappear from the “crawled – currently not indexed” status.

» Let's fix your indexing. Book a call with an SEO expert.

Poor internal linking and site structure

If your website isn't structured correctly or there's not enough internal linking within your menus and content pages, Google won’t index them.

Some common internal linking and site structure mistakes include:

• Orphaned pages: These pages have no incoming links from other web pages, which signals to the algorithm that they aren't important.
• Poor site URL structure: This happens when your website's URL structure isn’t done right, and Google doesn't understand the hierarchy of your content.
• Pages duplicated by default: This includes tag pages, category pages, and pagination. For instance, if your blog has multiple articles and you have "blog/page1," "blog/page2," etc., these pages don't provide additional value or new content, and Google will choose not to index them.
• Expired product pages: This refers to pages for products that you're not selling anymore or have been out of stock for a while.

How to fix it

With these issues, the problem basically indicates the solutions. You need to make sure your website's entire URL structure makes sense, the content is categorized correctly, and these categories are visible in the URL structure.

In addition, make sure you don't have any expired products on your website. If you have duplicated pages, remove them and improve internal linking on your website.

» Get perfectly SEO’d pages out of the box with Entail’s no-code page builder.

Poor domain health

If your domain health is poor, Google may view it as problematic or unreliable. As a result, they might not want to index your content.

Reasons for poor domain health may have to do with:

• Site history, penalties, and manual actions: This often occurs when you purchase a domain that was involved in manipulative or abusive SEO practices, such as spamming, malicious link building, creating satellite websites, etc.
• Low-quality backlinks: Your site could be the target of a link attack, where somebody creates spam links to your website, or you may build low-quality links that Google marks as spam.
• Fraudulent content: This refers to content used to deceive users, such as publishing false product reviews to get people to buy a product.

How to fix it

To improve domain health, begin by addressing the quality of your backlinks. Use tools like Ahrefs to identify harmful backlinks and disavow them through Google Search Console.

Then, focus on improving the quality of your content and really making sure your website is working to show Google that it's trustworthy.

URL parameters

URL parameters often lead to duplicated content, which leads to these pages being crawled but not indexed.

Indexing → Pages → Crawled – currently not indexed → Examples



Examples of URL parameters include:

• UTM tags
• RSS feed URLs
• Category pages
• Topic pages
• Paginated URLs

These pages typically replicate existing content by linking to other articles without adding unique value on their own.

Indexing → Pages → Crawled – currently not indexed → Examples



How to fix it

To fix this issue, add content to pages with URL parameters. For example, you can include relevant information on a category page so that it provides value rather than just a list of links.

If you have URLs with UTM parameters or RSS feed URLs, you should block them by adding a robots.txt rule so Google's crawler stops indexing them.

API pages and private-facing content

API pages and private-facing content (e.g., development environments or admin dashboards) are also possible reasons for “crawled – currently not indexed.”

These pages aren't supposed to be indexed. However, if they're accessible, Google might crawl but not index them because they don't provide value.

Indexing → Pages → Crawled – currently not indexed → Examples



How to fix it

To solve this, block Google's crawler from reaching any API pages or private-facing content by adding rules to your robots.txt file. You can also add a noindex tag to these pages. 

Keep in mind that suddenly blocking many pages that have been indexed for a long time may also have a negative impact because you never know how Google will respond to extreme changes. In this case, you may want to start slowly removing some from the index and making sure that it doesn't impact anything else.

» Talk to an SEO expert to fix your indexing.

Blocked pages

You may have pages with noindex tags, canonical tags, or blocked by robots.txt. These pages aren’t supposed to be indexed. However, sometimes, they might still appear in the crawled but not indexed category.

Should you fix it?

Generally, these pages are supposed to be excluded from the index anyway, so you don’t have to take any action.

Bugs

Lastly, your pages might appear in the “crawled – currently not indexed” status due to a bug. So, this status might inaccurately reflect the indexing of your content.

For example, your pages may be reported as crawled but not indexed. However, if you perform a site crawl and look for the URL, it indicates that the content is indeed indexed. This is known as a false positive.

You can use Google Search Console's URL inspection tool to determine whether a page is indexed or not.

Google Search Console → URL inspection → Insert URL



Should you fix it?

Because your content is actually indexed, there’s nothing you need to do about this.

Solve and prevent “crawled – currently not indexed”

While there may be other reasons for having your content crawled but not indexed, these are the instances I see most often. If you apply the guidelines I’ve shared, you can get your pages indexed and prevent other pages from falling into the "crawled but not indexed" status in the future.