SEO: Fix Discovered – currently not indexed issues for small sites

“Discovered – not indexed” means that the new page has not been crawled yet, so Google (probably) did not even have that chance to look through the page.

Devproblems.com

When you are having a website and Google Search Console shows “Discover – currently not indexed”, there is a lot of online advice.

One of the biggest ones is: “Write good quality content”.

While this advice is useful, it is likely that it might have nothing to do with the quality of the to-index page. Because, “discovered – not indexed” means that the new page has not been crawled yet, so Google (probably) did not even have that chance to look through the page.

As Google says it themselves:

Discovered – currently not indexed: Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl.

Google

Of course, following the advice “write good content” is important, but most likely Google did not event have the chance to look at the page.

So, it could also be that your robots.txt is the cause as you sometimes read on other sites. But in those cases you would see it under the section ‘blocked by robots.txt’ in Search Console.

Or your server did overload.

Or your other pages emptied your crawl budget.

So, hereby an overview of advice to getting indexed:

• Write good quality content (seems not like a useful tip for this specific error, although the advice in itself seems wise)
• Check robots.txt
• Check internal linking
• Check Page Speed
• Check if your server did not overload.

How to fix Discovered – Currently not indexed?

In our cases, it simply helps to ask for an index in Google Search Console. It are only a couple of additional crawls per day, but in our case it forces Google to crawl your page.

If your page then appears in “crawled – currently not indexed” you can at least be more certain that it was the quality of the page that skipped indexing.

Other ways to become indexed:

• Get backlinks (could take a lot of time)
• Use Google Indexing API (is only supported for certain pages, for example with Job Posting)

What is your tip to getting indexed?