GSC pages not indexed: 'Crawled - currently not indexed' and the statuses that matter

A page listed as not indexed in GSC is a page Google knows about but won’t show in search results, and on most sites many of those are fine. Google says plainly that you shouldn’t expect every address on your site to be indexed; the goal is that every important page is.¹ So the question is never “why is this list long?” but “is any page that earns us money on it?”

This part of the series covers the Page indexing report in Google Search Console, what each common status means, which ones to ignore, and how to check a single page that sells.

Where to look

In GSC, open the Page indexing report. The chart shows how many of your pages are indexed and how many are not; below it, the table Why pages aren’t indexed groups the rest by reason.¹ Click a reason to see the addresses in it. Most sites have at least a few unindexed pages, but all important pages should be indexed.¹

Before reading the reasons, list your money pages: the home page, each service or product page, prices, contact. Those are the only ones worth chasing first.

The statuses that are usually fine

• Alternate page with proper canonical tag. The page points to another one as the main version, and that one is indexed; Google says there is nothing to do.¹ Language versions and tracking variants often land here.
• Page with redirect. An old or variant address that redirects to another page.¹ The page it redirects to is the one that counts. Check only that it is the right destination.
• Not found (404). The address returned “not found”. That is not necessarily a problem if the page was removed with no replacement; if it moved, redirect it (a 301) to its new address.¹
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google found the page is a duplicate of another and picked one to index, because you didn’t say which.¹ Google treats this as working as intended; if it picked the wrong one, mark your preferred page as canonical.¹ ²
• URL marked ‘noindex’. The page told Google not to index it.¹ Fine for thank-you pages, admin screens and drafts; a disaster on a service page.

Each of these turns into a problem in one situation: when a money page is in it. A service page marked ‘noindex’ or listed as a page with redirect is out of Google, whatever the label says.

The statuses that need a look

• Crawled - currently not indexed. Google visited the page and decided not to index it, for now. It may or may not be indexed later, and there is no need to resubmit it.¹ Google doesn’t give a reason. What we check first, as our own rule of thumb: is the page thin, a near copy of another page, or a page nothing else on the site links to? For a blog tag page, ignore it. For a service page, improve it: say something no other page on your site says, and link to it from your main pages.
• Discovered - currently not indexed. Google knows the address but hasn’t visited it yet; typically it postponed the visit because crawling then was expected to overload the site.¹ A handful is normal. Thousands usually mean the site generates many low-value addresses (filters, search results, calendars) or that the server is slow; fix that, and Google gets to the pages that matter sooner.
• Soft 404. The page says “not found”, or looks empty, but the server answers as if everything were fine.¹ Google’s advice: return a real 404 code for pages that are truly gone, and add real content to pages that aren’t.¹ An empty category or an out-of-stock product page is the classic case.
• URL blocked by robots.txt. Your robots.txt file stops Google from reading the page.¹ Note the trap: this is not the way to keep a page out of Google. Google’s advice for that is to remove the block and use a noindex instead.¹ If a money page is here, someone closed a door by mistake; it happens often after a redesign.

How to check one money page

For any page that matters, use URL inspection (the search bar at the top of GSC). Paste the address and read three things:³

1. The verdict. “URL is on Google” means the page is eligible to appear in results, not that it is guaranteed to.³ “URL is not on Google” comes with the same reasons as the report.
2. The canonical. GSC shows the user-declared canonical (the one your page names) and the Google-selected canonical (the one Google chose). If they differ, Google is indexing another address in place of this one.³
3. The last crawl. When Google last read the page. Important: the inspection shows the version Google indexed, not your live page.³

After you fix something, click Test live URL to check the current page, then Request indexing. A passing live test means Google can crawl the page, not that it will index it; requesting indexing doesn’t guarantee it either, and there is a daily limit.³ For many pages, send a sitemap instead.³

What to do this week

1. Inspect each money page, one by one. Ten pages take ten minutes.
2. For any that is not on Google, read its reason above and fix the cause, not the symptom: remove the stray noindex, open the robots.txt block, redirect or merge the near copy, add the content the page lacks.
3. Ignore the rest of the list unless it is growing fast. A long list of redirects, alternates and old 404s is a site in normal health.

If you are new to GSC, part 1 of this series explains what it is and the three questions to answer with it every week; this post is question three.

Where to go next

Our free website audit checks from the outside what Google can see: stray noindex tags, robots.txt blocks, canonicals and near-copy pages. The deep audit reads your own GSC data, with read-only access, and tells you which pages that matter are out of the index, why, and what to change first.

Notes. ¹ Google, “Page indexing report”. ² Google, “How to specify a canonical URL with rel="canonical" and other methods”. ³ Google, “URL Inspection tool”. Read on 26 October 2026. What we suggest checking under “Crawled - currently not indexed” and what many “Discovered - currently not indexed” pages usually point to are our own rules of thumb, not Google’s.