Why Google is not indexing your pages
Being indexed is not automatic. Google crawls far more than it indexes, and it declines pages constantly on quality and priority grounds. Search Console tells you why in the Pages report, but the labels are terse enough that people misread them.
Here is what each of the common statuses actually means.
"Discovered – currently not indexed"
Google knows the URL exists but has not crawled it. This is a priority decision: it has decided the page is not worth the crawl budget right now.
Usually a signal about the site rather than the page. Common causes: the site is new with little authority, the page is orphaned or only linked from deep in the structure, or you have published a large number of similar pages at once and Google is sampling rather than taking all of them.
The fix is links and quality, not resubmission. Link to the page from somewhere that already gets crawled often — your homepage or a page that ranks.
"Crawled – currently not indexed"
Google fetched it and chose not to index it. This is a quality judgement and it is the more serious of the two.
The usual causes: thin content, content that duplicates another page of yours, a page that adds nothing over what already ranks, or a doorway-style page that exists for a keyword rather than a reader.
The fix is to make the page better or accept that it should not exist. Resubmitting an unchanged page will not change the outcome — Google already looked.
If a large batch of programmatically generated pages sits in this status, treat it as a warning rather than a bug. Google is telling you the pages are too similar to each other. Adding genuinely different content to each is the only fix, and continuing to publish more of the same risks the whole domain.
"Excluded by noindex tag"
Explicit and usually intentional — thank-you pages, internal search results, admin areas. Worth checking, because the classic disaster is launching with the staging site's `noindex` still in place, and this status is where it shows up.
"Alternate page with proper canonical tag"
Google found the page but your canonical points elsewhere, so it indexed the target instead. Correct for genuine duplicates such as filtered listings. A bug if the canonical points at the wrong page — a common one is every paginated page canonicalising to page one, which deindexes the rest of the series.
What actually speeds up indexing
In order of effect: internal links from pages that already get crawled frequently; an accurate XML sitemap containing only canonical indexable URLs; publishing consistently, which raises crawl frequency over time; and external links, which remain the strongest signal that a page is worth indexing.
URL Inspection → Request Indexing works for individual important pages and is not a bulk tool. It also does not override a quality decision — a thin page requested for indexing will still be declined.
Common questions
How long does Google take to index a new page?
Anywhere from hours to several weeks. Established sites that publish regularly get crawled within a day or two. New sites with few links can wait weeks. If a page is still unindexed after a month, it is a signal rather than a delay.
What is the difference between discovered and crawled but not indexed?
Discovered means Google knows the URL exists but has not fetched it — a crawl-priority decision, usually about authority and internal linking. Crawled means it fetched the page and decided against indexing it — a quality decision about that specific page.
Does requesting indexing in Search Console work?
For individual pages, it helps get them looked at sooner. It does not override a quality judgement, and it is not usable at scale. If many pages are unindexed, fix the underlying cause rather than requesting each one.
Can too many pages hurt indexing?
Yes. Publishing a large volume of similar low-value pages spreads crawl budget thin and can lead Google to sample rather than index the set. Fewer, genuinely distinct pages index far more reliably than many near-identical ones.
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