Search Console Page Indexing Errors: What Each Status Means and What to Do

On this page

1. First, ask: should this page be indexed?
2. Crawled – currently not indexed
3. Discovered – currently not indexed
4. Duplicate and canonical statuses
5. Excluded on purpose, or by accident
6. Errors that need fixing quickly
7. Fixing, validating and checking monthly

Open the Pages report in Google Search Console and you'll usually see a grey bar of "Not indexed" pages, with a list of reasons that sound alarming. Some statuses are perfectly normal, a few need action, and one or two can quietly keep your most important pages out of Google. This guide explains the common statuses in plain English and what to do about each. For an overview of the other reports, see Google Search Console reports explained.

First, ask: should this page be indexed?

First, click into a status and look at the example URLs. Sort them into two groups:

• Pages that should be in Google: your homepage, service pages, location pages, products, categories and blog posts
• Pages that don't need to be: thank-you pages, cart and checkout, login pages, internal search results (?s=), feed URLs ending in /feed/, tag and date archives, URLs with tracking parameters, and old URLs that now redirect

If a status only contains the second group, it's usually fine. Leftover demo content from a theme import is better deleted. The number of not-indexed pages isn't a score. What matters is whether the pages you care about are indexed, so run your key pages through the URL Inspection tool to check each one directly.

Crawled – currently not indexed

Google visited the page, read it, and decided not to add it to the index. Nothing is technically blocking it. It's usually a judgement about quality or value.

Common causes:

• Thin pages with little unique text, such as a service page with two lines and a contact form
• Pages very similar to others on your site, like near-identical city pages
• Low-value archives: tag pages, author pages or paginated blog archives
• New pages on a young site that Google hasn't built trust in yet

What to do: make the pages that matter genuinely useful. Add real detail, answers to common questions, photos of your work, what affects pricing, and proof such as reviews or project examples. Link to them from relevant pages on your site, merge weak pages that overlap, then request indexing in URL Inspection. For low-value archives, it's fine to leave them out or set them to noindex.

Discovered – currently not indexed

Google knows the URL exists, usually from your sitemap or a link, but hasn't crawled it yet. Google's own help notes that this often happens when crawling right then was expected to overload the site, so the crawl was rescheduled.

Common causes:

• A new site, or a large batch of pages published at once
• Slow hosting or server errors that make Google crawl cautiously
• Pages with few or no internal links, so Google treats them as unimportant
• Thousands of low-value URLs (filters, parameters, archives) competing for Google's attention

What to do: link to these pages from your navigation, homepage or related content, improve server response times, and stop low-value URLs being generated. On a new site, patience plus good internal links usually solves it; see how to get your website indexed faster.

Duplicate and canonical statuses

These three are about which version of a page Google treats as the original:

Status	What it means	What to do
Alternate page with proper canonical tag	The page points to another URL as the original, and Google agreed	Usually nothing. This is working as intended.
Duplicate without user-selected canonical	Google sees this page as a duplicate, no canonical is set, and Google picked another URL as the original	If Google's choice is right, leave it. If not, add a canonical tag pointing to your preferred URL.
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user	Your canonical tag says one thing, but Google chose another URL	Check the pages really are duplicates, make internal links and your sitemap match your canonical, or make the pages clearly different.

On WordPress sites, typical culprits are http and https (or www and non-www) versions both loading, URLs with parameters such as ?replytocom= or ad tracking tags, and near-identical product or location pages. URL Inspection shows which canonical Google selected for any page. More detail in canonical tags explained.

Excluded on purpose, or by accident

• Excluded by 'noindex' tag: the page tells Google not to index it. Right for thank-you pages and private areas; a serious problem on a service page. Common causes are the WordPress "Discourage search engines" setting left on after launch, or an SEO plugin setting applied to a whole post type by mistake.
• Blocked by robots.txt: Google isn't allowed to crawl the URL. Fine for admin and cart URLs, but check no important folder is blocked. Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing, so use noindex to keep a page out of results; see robots.txt explained.
• Page with redirect: the URL redirects somewhere else. Normal after a redesign or URL change; make sure your sitemap and internal links point to the final URLs, not the old ones.

Errors that need fixing quickly

• Not found (404): the URL no longer exists. If it's an old page with links or traffic, 301 redirect it to the closest relevant page. If it was never important, a 404 is fine.
• Soft 404: the page loads normally but looks empty or like an error to Google, such as an empty category or a product page with no content left. Add proper content, redirect it, or let it return a real 404.
• Server error (5xx): your server failed when Google visited. The odd error happens; repeated ones point to hosting limits, a plugin conflict or a firewall blocking Googlebot.
• Redirect error: a redirect chain that's too long, a loop, or a redirect to a broken URL. Often caused by conflicting rules in a redirect plugin, .htaccess and a CDN.

Fixing, validating and checking monthly

1. Fix the cause on your site first
2. In URL Inspection, use Test live URL to confirm Google now sees the fixed version
3. Request indexing for a few important pages
4. Click Validate fix on that status in the Pages report, so Google rechecks the affected URLs
5. Be patient: recrawling and validation can take days to weeks

Once a month, check that your key pages are still indexed and look for new statuses that include important URLs. A sudden jump in not-indexed service pages usually means a technical change, such as a plugin update, a redesign or a noindex setting, rather than a Google penalty.

Looking at a long list of not-indexed pages and unsure which ones matter? I review Search Console and fix the underlying WordPress issues as part of WordPress SEO services, and keep an eye on them through ongoing WordPress maintenance.