Eventually, Googlebot might get around to crawling your site. That’s the moment when it fetches pages from your server and processes them further for potential indexing. Once crawled, the URL may move to the “Crawled—currently not indexed” status, or the page might get indexed.
Today, we’ll dive into Google Search Console’s “Discovered—currently not indexed” status in the Page Indexing report.
When using Google Search Console—and you should use it—you may have noticed this status among the reasons for pages not being indexed.
One of the most frequent questions we receive is about the “Discovered—currently not indexed” status. Let’s explore what it means and what you can do about it.
First and foremost, Google will almost never index all content from a site. This isn’t an error and not necessarily a problem that needs addressing. It’s merely a note on the status of those pages mentioned.
To understand what this means, we need to look at how a page proceeds through the systems and processes that make up Google Search.
At the very beginning, Googlebot finds a URL somewhere—perhaps in a sitemap or a link. Googlebot has now discovered that this URL exists. It essentially puts it into a to-do list of URLs to visit and possibly index later on. In an ideal world, Googlebot would immediately get to work on this URL. But as you probably know from your own to-do list, that isn’t always possible.
And that’s the first reason you might see this status in Google Search Console—Googlebot simply didn’t get around to crawling the URL yet, as it was busy with other URLs. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a bit more patience on your end to get this resolved.
Eventually, Googlebot might get around to crawling it. That’s when it fetches the page from your server and processes it further, potentially leading to indexing. Once it gets to crawling, the URL would move to the “Crawled—currently not indexed” status or get indexed. But what if it doesn’t get crawled and stays in “Discovered—currently not indexed”?
Well, that usually relates either to your server or your website’s quality. Let’s look at potential technical reasons first.
Suppose you have a webshop and just added a thousand new products. Googlebot discovers all these products at the same time and wants to crawl them. In previous crawls, however, it noticed that your server becomes slow or even overwhelmed when trying to crawl more than 10 products simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming your server, Googlebot might decide to crawl them over a longer period—say, 10 products at a time over a few hours, rather than all thousand products within the same hour. This means that not all 1,000 products get crawled simultaneously, and Googlebot will take longer to process them.
It makes sense to look at the Crawl Stats report and the response section in there to see if your server responds slowly or with HTTP 500 errors when Googlebot tries to crawl. Note that this usually only matters for sites with very large amounts of pages—say, millions or more—but server issues can happen to smaller sites too. It’s worth checking with your hosting company on how to fix these performance issues if they arise.
The other, far more common, reason for pages staying in “Discovered—currently not indexed” is quality. When Google Search notices a pattern of low-quality or thin content on your pages, they might be removed from the index and remain in “Discovered.” Googlebot knows about these pages but chooses not to proceed with them. If Google Search detects a pattern of low-quality content on your site, it might skip these URLs altogether, leaving them in “Discovered.”
If you care about these pages, consider reworking the content to improve its quality and ensure your internal linking connects this content to other relevant parts of your site. For more information on internal linking, refer to our episode on the topic.
In summary, most sites will have some pages that won’t get indexed, and that’s usually fine. If you believe a page should be indexed, consider checking the quality of the content on those pages that remain in “Discovered—currently not indexed.” Additionally, ensure your server isn’t giving Googlebot signals that it is overwhelmed when crawling.
Please leave us a comment if you’d like more technical content on Google Search Central and what other topics we should cover.
