Discovered, currently not indexed: what it means and how to fix it

Google’s Page indexing report gives this definition: “The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl.” Google has the address, from a sitemap or a link, and has not yet read the page.

Google decides how much of a site to crawl from how the site responds and how much it expects to gain. Four things keep pages waiting.

• The site is new, and Google is still deciding how much attention it deserves.
• The server is slow or returns errors, so Google holds back to avoid overloading it.
• The pages are poorly linked: listed in a sitemap, but reachable from no menu and no other page.
• The site has far more addresses than useful pages, from filters, search results or duplicated paths.

Each cause has its own fix.

1. Link to the pages from the home page, the menus and related pages. Internal links are the strongest signal that a page matters.
2. Keep the sitemap accurate: every page you want indexed, and no address that redirects or errors.
3. Make the server respond quickly. Our guide to checking your website speed shows how to measure it.
4. Cut the low-value addresses. Stop filters and internal search results from creating crawlable pages.
5. Request indexing for the few pages that matter most, through the URL Inspection tool.

On a new site this status often clears without help as Google’s visits become more frequent. If the pages listed are ones nobody needs to find, there is no problem to solve.

A site where most pages sit at this status for months is one Google has little reason to visit. The causes are then the same as for a site that does not appear at all, covered in why your website is not showing up on Google. Pages that were fetched and still left out are a separate case: Crawled, currently not indexed.