Google advises that the “Currently not indexed” status of the Index Coverage report in Search Console can last forever as there is no guarantee that every page on the web will be indexed.
This came during a Google Search Central SEO Business Hours Hangout that was recorded on February 18th.
Someone named Davor Bobek joins the livestream to ask Google search attorney John Mueller about the “Discovered – not currently indexed” message and how long it can be expected to last.
This message means that the page has been found by Google, but has not yet been crawled.
There are several reasons why Google may not crawl a page, despite knowing it exists.
It could be due to technical reasons. Google may have tried to crawl the URL but the site was overloaded. If so, Google will reschedule the crawl to a later date.
Another reason for the “detected – not currently indexed” message could be because the website does not meet a certain quality threshold, from Google’s point of view.
Google makes no guarantees that every web page will be crawled and indexed.
Although Google is one of the largest companies in the world, it has limited resources when it comes to computing power.
The computing resources that Google uses to crawl the web are reserved for websites that are valuable and of high quality.
To this end, the “discovered – not currently indexed” status can persist forever.
Mueller says a lot in his response, and you can read it in the next section.
Google index coverage report: “Detected – not currently indexed”
When asked how long web pages can remain discovered but not indexed, Mueller replied:
It could be forever. It’s something where we don’t crawl and index all the pages. And it’s completely normal for any website that we don’t have everything indexed.
And especially with a newer website if you have a lot of content, I suppose it’s to be expected that a lot of new content will be discovered for a while and not indexed.
And then, over time, there’s usually some kind of shift, like it’s already crawled, or it’s already indexed, when we see that there’s really value in focusing more on the website itself. But it’s not guaranteed.”
So, what can you do if you have a number of pages discovered by Google but not indexed?
Instead of leaving the content as it is and hoping that one day it will get indexed, you should keep working on your website to improve its overall quality.
Mueller continues:
“So from that point of view, I’m not saying you have to wait a little while and all of a sudden things are going to get better with crawling and indexing. It’s more like continuing to work on the website and making sure our systems understand that there’s value in crawling and indexing more and then over time we’ll crawl And index more.”
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below.
For more information about how to prevent quality issues from indexing content, see the following articles:
- Google: Sites must be worthwhile to be indexed
- Google: It is normal for website pages not to be indexed
- Google will likely index important content
Featured image: IB Photography / Shutterstock
