“Crawled – Currently not Indexed” Finally Explained

ZipTie Team

4 min read

Published: June 1, 2023

Crawled but not indexed is a common reason that a page isn’t indexed. Let’s explore how to fix this issue for your website! What do we know about Crawled – Currently not Indexed? This could mean one of two things: Three most common reasons for “Crawled – Currently not Indexed” There are three most common […]

Crawled but not indexed is a common reason that a page isn’t indexed. Let’s explore how to fix this issue for your website!

What do we know about Crawled – Currently not Indexed? This could mean one of two things:

1. The page was indexed beforehand, but later, it was deindexed. This is still quite common.
2. The page has never been indexed. It was crawled, but Google chose not to include it in its index.

Three most common reasons for “Crawled – Currently not Indexed”

There are three most common reasons:

1. Google considers the page irrelevant or low-quality.
2. There are problems caused by JavaScript SEO issues (i.e. Google doesn’t see content generated by JavaScript).
3. The most surprising reason: Google isn’t convinced about the website overall.

Let’s look deeper into these three reasons

1. Google isn’t convinced about the website overall.

It might be surprising, but a page might not be indexed because Google isn’t convinced about the overall quality of the website. John Mueller from Google explains that when Google’s algorithms aren’t sure about the overall quality of a website, they might crawl the URL but decide not to index it.

Let me quote John Mueller:

• “A lot of the pages that I’ve seen on Twitter that get flagged for kind of these issues where they fall into discovered not indexed or crawled not indexed. It tends to be that the website overall is kind of in this murky area.”
• “A common situation is really that our algorithms are just not sure about the overall quality of the website. And in cases like that, we might crawl the URL, we might look at the content and say: “I don’t know”.”

2.  Website suffers from JavaScript SEO issues

Sometimes a page might be high quality, but Google can’t see its value because it can’t render the website properly. This could be due to JavaScript issues.

To check if this is the problem, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to see how Google renders your content. Make sure important elements are visible and accessible.

To illustrate the problem I like to use the Disqus.com case. Users get a fully-featured website.

And Google is getting an empty page. This is something that you will notice by using the URL Inspection tool in Google.

Expand table

If you see your page as high quality, but still the page is classified as “Crawled – currently not indexed”, check in the URL Inspection Tool to see how Google renders your content.

• Check the screenshots – to see if some crucial elements are missing.
• Check the HTML tag to see if Google can see all the important elements.

3. A page is unhelpful or low quality

Google aims to provide users with relevant and high-quality content. If a page is low quality or outdated, it might not be indexed.

To objectively assess your content’s quality, use Google’s list of Content and Quality questions.

How to check if a page is classified as “Crawled –  currently not indexed”?

To find affected pages, go to Google Search Console and click on Indexing -> Pages.

Click on “Crawled – currently not indexed” to see a sample of up to 1,000 URLs.

Remember that the report might show outdated information, so double-check using the URL Inspection tool.

The workflow to fix “Crawled – Currently not Indexed”.

Here’s a workflow to fix “Crawled – but not Indexed” issues:

1. Identify the reason why the page isn’t indexed (e.g., low-quality content, JavaScript issues, or website quality).
2. Address the specific issue (e.g., improve the content, fix JavaScript problems, or enhance overall website quality).

Take control of your deindexed pages

In this article, I explained that one reason for the status “Crawled – but not Indexed” is when a previously indexed page gets removed from the index. This occurrence is quite common, particularly during core updates.

Luckily, ziptie.ai/ provides an Indexing Monitoring module that can help you with this. By using ZipTie, you can easily identify the specific URLs that have been deindexed by Google. Don’t hesitate to give it a try and see the benefits for yourself! Check out our 14-day trial!

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