Google Console Crawled - Currently Not Indexed

Today I was reviewing my webmaster's Google Search Console Coverage section, there are 11.4K Affected pages - that’s a lot of pages that are being crawled and not indexed.

This is a good opportunity to optimize your website.

For this client, we needed to figure out what is going on here. Google does not give you specifics as to what causes a particular page to be crawled but not indexed. However, as a webmaster, you should know some common standards when developing your websites to avoid getting your web pages not indexed by Google.

Here are some common issues to look for to avoid not getting indexed:

  1. Soft 404 - these are pages with little or no valuable content
  2. Thin Content - Pages with soft 404 errors means google thinks these pages do not have enough content and might flag your page as soft 404
  3. Private/Paywall - These are pages that require login
  4. Duplicate Content - Avoid duplicate content. If you have a website were user content is provided, moderate the content to make sure is not a copy/paste from another website.
  5. Paginated Pages - If you have paginated pages, be sure to use canonical tags
  6. 301 Redirects - Property redirect your pages. Its preferred to redirect your pages through headers and not code like JavaScript.
  7. Expired Pages - If you have expiration dates on your pages, make sure they are current
  8. False Positives - These are pages that might have the word "error" in the title

These are some of the details we think you might see your pages not indexed by Google. Unfortunately, Google does not give any specifics. The best advice is to make sure you are giving your users the best experience possible. That means you are providing helfup and insightful content.

When you are writing content for a page, go in-depth to the topic you are writing about. Avoid large images as this will affect your load time. Only add and image in situations where it is imperative that the user will benefit from the image content and is relevant to the article topic.

We will continue to monitor our client’s content and make the appropriate improvements to take opportunities on the pages that are not being indexed. We will update you if the improvements have helped and if we found other potential flags for the unindexed pages.

Thank you.

The Webune Team