“Crawled – currently not indexed”: How to Fix it?

When indexing the pages of a website to appear on Google, unfortunately, errors can occur, and one of the most frequently reported errors is “Crawled – currently not indexed”.

This problem can have many origins, and Google support, which should work a real support network and clear doubts, unfortunately does not provide any practical and objective solution for users, who are confused about how to proceed from there.

In addition, most of the content that exists on the internet on the subject basically lends itself to replicating the theoretical information provided by Google itself and, in the end, there is a dearth of practical information on how to solve the problem.

Therefore, in the article you will find a list of procedures that you can do in order to make the pages of your site be indexed again or start to be indexed.

But first, let’s understand what this status means and what its origins are, and then we can design a practical solution for you to implement right away.

What does the page status “Crawled – currently not indexed” mean?

This status is seen in Google Search Console , Google’s tool for webmasters, which assists in the indexing of blogs and websites pages, when the user requests, either directly or via sitemap , the indexing of a page so that it appears in the search results of the Google.

According to the official explanation, taken from the Google Search Console support site, this status means that:

Source: Google Search Console Support.

Crawled – currently not indexed : The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future, and there is no need to resubmit the URL for crawling.

That is, it means that Googlebot, the Google robot that crawls pages, has already gone through your page, done the standard scan, but for some reason decided not to index the page.

This decision is not irrevocable, the robot will continue to do its standard page scan and, at another time when it goes through the page again, it may decide to index it.

Also, it is important to note that the status “Crawled – currently not indexed” is not the same as the status “Discovered – currently not indexed”.

As seen, when the page is crawled, it means that Google has already passed the page and decided not to index it. In the second case, it means that Google has detected the page, knows that it exists on your site, but has not yet scanned it for indexing, which will be done at a later time.

So in the case of “Discovered”, no issues were discovered on your page and indexing did not occur probably for markdown reasons.

In the case of the page “Crawled – currently not indexed”, this means that there is probably an error, either on the page or on the site, that is causing the Google robot to decide not to index it.

But what would that problem(s) be?

Below we will analyze the main reasons that may be behind the problem of indexing pages on your website or blog.

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Top errors that prevent pages from being indexed

As said by Google itself on its official pages, there can be many problems that are behind the indexing error, the problem is to find out exactly WHAT the specific problem is.

Google would make life a lot easier for users if they simply reported the reason in the bug report, but unfortunately, we have to try and error out each case in search of answers.

The following are possible errors that could be affecting your website or blog and preventing pages from being indexed, so you need to evaluate them all:

Low-value or duplicate content

Google, since the last algorithm updates, started to pay more than special attention to the content of the pages it indexes.

This means that sites that do not offer content of real value to their users will not be indexed by Google.

Therefore, if you want your pages to reach the dreamed “top” of ranked pages, you must make quality the motto of all your content, making long posts (over 1200 words), very detailed and delivering content to the user. .

If your page simply replicates “more of the same”, sharing the same kind of content that can be found on a hundred blogs out there, maybe that’s the reason for your problems.

Content that violates copyright

This is the famous plagiarism situation.

If someone takes someone else’s content (even if in another language) and makes small changes in order to “mask” the truth, they are committing plagiarism.

Despite the actual legal consequences this may have, within Google, it means that your page has violated one of the site’s guidelines and your page will not be indexed.

Incidentally, the same pattern of exclusion of duplicate pages is also used to accept or not to participate in the Google Partner Program (Google Adsense).

So keep your blog 100% original and free of plagiarism, and in case you have plagiarized content on your site, this may be the reason for your problem with indexing your pages.

Low technical quality of the blog or website

If your content is 100% original and differentiated and even so your posts continue to be blocked and not indexed by Google, then perhaps the problem lies in the technical quality of your site.

Currently, more than 70% of accesses to blogs and websites are made through mobile devices (cell phones, mainly), so your website must be fully responsive to suit different screen sizes, display, etc.

If you are not looking after the technical quality of your site, updating the formatting and languages ​​used daily, this could be the cause of your page indexing problem.

Later we’ll look at the best ways to improve the technical quality of your site (and not just the problem page).

For now, just be aware that Google no longer accepts sites with low technical quality and, therefore, you should regularly work on this aspect and, if your site is not 100% well structured, this may be the reason for your problems.

Your website is still a few months old

If your site is still very new, this might be the reason for your indexing problem with Google.

As we will see later, one of the best practices that ensure your site is indexed on Google pages is to have a good network of well-established internal links.

And, in the case of a site that is still very new, there are not many pages for us to build this network of links, and, as a consequence, indexing problems can occur.

These are just the most common causes , and even though there are many other possible causes, it would be impossible and unnecessary to attempt to describe them all here.

Knowing, now, the possible causes of your problem, let’s now go to the practical part: what you should do to try to reverse the indexing problem and make Google rank your page.

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Tutorial: How to fix the “Crawled – currently not indexed” status issue

The following tutorial is written in the simplest and most practical way possible, providing you with simple and technical steps of what to do to solve the problem of indexing your pages in Google.

To get the desired results, it is ESSENTIAL that you follow ALL the steps described.

Doing just one of the steps and hoping the problem is an error and will only waste your time.

Follow the steps and, above all, be patient throughout the process and after it as well, and you will greatly increase your chances of solving the “Crawled – currently not indexed” problem.

1º STEP: Improve the technical quality of your website by eliminating all the “Core Web Vitals” problems

The first thing to do if you are experiencing the “Crawled – currently not indexed” error is to check your site’s Core Web Vitals .

Core Web Vitals are elements that show the “health” of your website when users try to access it. This means that these metrics are tied to the structural quality of the site as a whole , verified on both mobile and desktop devices , so they vary up or down according to that quality.

This assessment is important because, to solve this problem, we need to pay attention to the quality of the entire site, not just the site that has been having problems.

This is exactly the advice given by John Mu, a Google advocate, when asking about how to proceed when faced with the “Crawled – currently not indexed” error:

John Mu (Google Advocate) | Posted on his Twitter account.

You can’t force pages to be indexed — it’s normal that we don’t index all pages on all websites. It’s not an issue with “that page”, it’s more site-wide. Creating a good site structure and making sure the site is of the highest quality possible is essentially the direction.

Knowing that this is a problem of the entire site, we need to focus on solving the main structural problems of the site, through the analysis of Core Web Vitals, so that the pages are indexed again.

These metrics can be seen in your Google Search Console “ Experience ” dashboard, just below the Coverage map:

As can be seen in the image above, the analyzed site presents “bad” results of Core Web Vitals.

These bad metrics signal to Google that a large number of pages on the site do not offer a good navigation experience to the user , probably presenting slowness, broken pages or navigation difficulties.

After identifying the problem, the following question arises: how to make these metrics green?

And that’s what you’re going to learn now.

Checking page browsing experience issues

To see exactly what technical issues are causing your page to perform poorly, you need to use a tool that does a thorough analysis of your site’s pages and returns specific values: Web.dev.

Web.dev is a site recommended by Google Search Console itself and is able to crawl your site and point you where to make technical changes to improve the quality of your pages.

To do this, follow these steps:

First go to Web.Dev , enter your website link and click the “ RUN AUDIT ” button:

After that, the site will return to you various data about three specific parts of your site: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO.

You should now see this after the end of the analysis:

A score from 0 to 100 will be assigned to each of these areas and you should be aware if any of them have a value LESS than 90 . If this happens, a red flag has been triggered and your site is probably not structurally well done.

Performance : it concerns the speed that yours appears to the user, speed is the main aspect analyzed.

Accessibility: It concerns the responsiveness of your website towards users. Your site should have the correct sized font size, non-overlapping features and buttons, etc.

Best practices: Analyzes the way the site is coded, that is, if the HTML and CSS codes were structured in the best possible way. When poorly designed, these codes can cause page rendering problems in the browser.

SEO: This is perhaps the most important metric to measure. Problems in this part of the diagnosis could indicate that your site is not well structured for search engines to crawl your pages and index correctly.

But the big question that remains, especially if you are not a Developer and have experience with website development, is: how to solve the problem?

And there are two approaches to this.

The first is for users who have their own structuring website, developed by a specialized company, for example.

And the second is for CMS users – Content Management System – (such as WordPress, Joomla, etc ), which I believe is most of the cases.

Own structured websites

As they do not have a standardized structure, it is impossible for anyone to offer any kind of solution. Only the person who developed the site has the elements and ability to understand the structure of the site and solve problems. Contact the developer and let them know that the site is experiencing Core Web Vitals issues and talk about the Web.Dev report, analyzing the data, he will be able to adjust the site, eliminating the “Crawled – currently not indexed” issue. .

CMS Websites (WordPress, Joomla, etc)

If you are a CMS user, the best way to solve the Core Web Vitals problem is to change the tamplate/theme of your website or blog.

The explanation is very simple. Practically all the metrics used to evaluate the site are contained within the template of your wordpress site, therefore, by changing the template, we can change these metrics.

Also, keep your template up to date (either FREE or PREMIUM template). Typically, you get a message on your website’s control panel letting you know when there are new updates. This routine practice is necessary so that your site does not become outdated over time.

This reminds us of the importance of using current, responsive templates and themes that are constantly being updated. If you use an old template that is no longer supported by developers, Core Web Vitals issues can become common because Google’s algorithm improves every day.

The images below show what happens to the Core Web Vitals from the SAME site when the template is changed:

Then, the change was made to another template and the same site presented these metrics:

As you can see, the metrics were completely changed just by changing the site template to another one with better performance, that is, in a matter of minutes.

Also remember that it is practically impossible to achieve perfect metrics, that is, to reach 100 in all aspects. Be satisfied with values ​​above 90.

So how to do it?

1. If you use a premium template, is PAID, contact your template developers and report the problem and ask for a theme update;
2. If you use a FREE template (most people): look for the most current themes that are available for use on the WordPress site itself. Always check when the template was last updated, so you’ll know if it’s an outdated theme or not.

Currently, the two free templates that have the best Coew Web Vitals results are Generate Express and Astra .

These templates are designed to be extremely fast, using few resources on your server, they are 100% responsive and, therefore, present great results in metrics, as you can see in the tests done above.

In short, you MUST change your site template to a template that records good Core Web Vitals as mentioned above, without which it is impossible to change the values.

And after changing the template, what to do?

After that, you must ask Google, in the Google Search Console dashboard, to initiate a validation of the pages that were having problems.

To do this, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Google Search Console dashboard;
2. In the “Experience” panel, click on “Core Web Vitals”;
3. Within that, first go to the MOBILE DEVICES tab and click on “Open report” (then you have to do the same procedure on the “DESKTOP” tab;
4. Select the checkbox on all page options: Poor, Need Improvement, Good.
5. Under “Details”, just below, click on the option that shows the pages with problems. In the case of the image below, there are no “Good” or “Poor” pages, only “Need Improvements” pages.
6. On the page that opens, click on “VALIDATE FIX”. This will make Google analyze your pages and see if your problems are still there.

After doing the above procedure, you will see a page like this:

Google itself informs that this validation can take up to 28 DAYS , and even then there is no guarantee of completion in this period, only an expectation that it will happen.

Therefore, it is necessary to have a lot of PATIENCE , as the results of template changes do not take effect overnight.

Then, repeat the same sequence, only now clicking on the “DESKTOP” tab. Because it is necessary to validate both for mobile devices and for computers (go back to step 3).

In my case, after just ONE DAY, the pages were validated via Desktop. You receive the message that the validation was “PASSED” as shown in the image below:

In the case of mobile devices, it took approximately 21 days for the validation to be approved. But it also happened.

That is, changing the template of a WordPress site was able to solve all the problems of Core Web Vitals and made Google Search Console validate all of them, pointing out that the errors from before disappeared completely.

After that, ALL my pages were indexed again normally since the validation done via computer was completed, but you have to be patient and wait at least a month to know if everything went well or not.

I recommend that you keep submitting pages for indexing after validation requests and see what happens. It is very likely that, “out of nowhere”, your pages will be indexed again.

What if the template change didn’t work?

If you’ve followed all these steps, your site is now showing excellent Core Web Vitals results, you’ve submitted multiple pages for indexing, and the “Crawled – currently not indexed” issue still persists, then most likely the problem persists. of your site is related to the content or the absence of good linking from internal pages.

Changing the template or developer review solves your site’s technical issues, and if Google has already validated the issues and the pages still don’t index, your problem could be one of two things.

In other words, you may be posting duplicate content (more of the same) , plagiarized (infringes copyright) or low quality content or you are not properly linking your site pages internally.

Whatever your mistake, below you’ll find out how to resolve these issues if the Core Web Vitals improvement failed to get your pages re-indexed.

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STEP 2: Resolve duplicate, copyright-infringing, or low-quality content

There is no need to create a specific topic for each of these problems because the way to solve them all is one: increasing the quality of your written content.

As for “more of the same” duplicate content, think about how the internet is filled with the same content, how do you think about standing out and ranking your page at the top doing what everyone else is doing? This page you read now is the opposite of “more of the same”, I didn’t find any page with a specific tutorial on how to solve the “Crawled – currently not indexed” error, so I decided to create this unique, practical content and objective.

Do the same and look for unique, little-covered topics. The main difference here is INNOVATION, be the first to publish on a certain subject and that will make you an authority in that area.

As for content that “infringes copyright” and plagiarism, I don’t think I need to say. The idea of ​​taking content from other sites and trying to mask that it is copyrighted content is dirty and criminal. If you don’t want to face problems with Google and serious legal problems, it’s imperative that you don’t even think about it. By the way, translating content from other languages ​​is also considered plagiarism by Google.

Low quality content is linked to the article itself, to the quality of the information you are passing on. Google is not the same as it was in 2013, if you think you can rank on Google by writing 500 word articles, you’re done. Google increasingly wants dense and long content, at least today, I would say that a post to rank well on Google must have 1200 words, in addition to being, of course, 100% authorial and non-repetitive content.

Improve your already published articles, delete any plagiarized articles and constantly renew your posts so they are always current for Google.

Following these steps, after you have made the improvement to your Core Web Vitals, be patient and wait to see if your problems are still with the articles already published and the ones that were published after the improvements were made.

STEP 3: Make a good anchoring and linking of internal pages (create referring pages)

Another very important factor, and often overlooked by content producers, is the absence of a well-done internal page link.

And the absence of this link can harm the indexing of your site as a whole.

Google, when crawling a page, checks all internal pages (other pages on your site) that point to the page you are indexing and also the pages that exist within your post. That is, the internal pages are evaluated as a whole.

NEVER, under any circumstances, should you ask for a page to be indexed without having made any internal links on it.

Furthermore, the “quality” of the pages you link to makes a difference when Google decides to index the page or not.

When you index the page, Google identifies all the internal links in the post and evaluates them: they are called referring pages.

In the images below you can see a page where indexing was requested, but there were no internal links on it, and Google did not index it, and another where there were several internal links, and Google indexed normally:

So if you really need a page to be indexed as quickly as possible, link extremely well to them.

Remembering that it is not about the number of links, but their QUALITY.

So put links on your most important pages (which get the most visits) pointing to the page you intend to index, and also put several links in your post pointing to other articles on the site.

There is no specific number of internal links you should put in each post, but 3 links is a reasonably good amount.

So, never forget to build an excellent network of internal links on every page you intend to index BEFORE submitting to Google Search Console.

This will lessen the chances of your page being rejected (remember, you should do this AFTER improving your Site Core Web Vitals, and being sure of the quality of your pages, doing this step alone is probably not enough to get Google to index your pages).

STEP 4: As a last resort, delete and repost the unindexed page

If you followed all the steps above: improved your site’s Core Web Vitals, ensured the quality of your posts, linked well internal pages, and waited a reasonable amount of time for your new site to be found by Google and index the pages, but even so, nothing resolved, there is still one last attempt: delete and repost your post.

This should ONLY be done if ALL other approaches have failed.

This isn’t the best of approaches, as it’s never good to delete pages (this can mess up your SEO), so it’s always best to try to preserve them by maintaining them periodically.

But if you faithfully followed all the steps listed, but Google is still not indexing your pages or if Google is only indexing new pages (and the old ones, posted before following this tutorial, are not indexed), it may be better to repost them. .

Be sure to do this only after ALL other attempts have failed and you have waited a reasonable period of time (at least a month after the improvements are complete), and Google still does not index the pages.

This happened to me.

I did the procedure and all the new pages started to be indexed normally, without problems, but the old pages were not indexed (I believe this is due to some impediment of the Google algorithm).

So delete the page that is not being indexed, preferably make some text improvements (so you don’t post the exact same text again), try changing the post title and especially the page’s SLUG (which shows how the page is in the browser):

It is important that it looks different so that the algorithm understands that this is a new page and that it should be considered under the new improvements made.

If there aren’t any issues that went unnoticed, reposting the page will likely cause Google to index them if you’ve followed all the other steps above.

STEP 5 (EXTRA): Check the age of your site

This is not exactly a step to take, but just something you should be aware of, as the age of your website or blog could be influencing when Google indexes pages and causing the “Crawled – currently not indexed”.

This specific case often happens with websites that are very new (less than 3 months old).

In these cases it is common for Google to take a long time to index your pages, so I need patience.

The best you can do is make sure your Core Web Vitals are good, your content is quality, submit site posts via sitemaps and via direct indexing in Google Search Console, link well from internal pages, and be patient for see if the pages will be indexed or not.

Only after a long period of time can you consider the existence of a problem (more than 3 months with NO pages being indexed).

And if that happens, just follow the practices described here to solve the problem.

Conclusion

The “Crawled – currently not indexed” problem is a mistake that is becoming more and more common and causing problems for content producers and bloggers around the world.

And, unfortunately, most of the articles available on the internet do not provide objective information, a “path” to follow in an attempt to put an end to the problem.

Therefore, in this article, the problem was approached from different points (technical, content, algorithm problems, etc.), in order to provide a quick solution and solve some important questions for everyone.

As with everything that involves the Google algorithm, there is no solution that is 100% likely to work, but the tutorial posted here provides real chances to get your site pages back to being indexed quickly and normally.

Thanks for reading this far.

If you liked this article, please share it on your social networks and comment below whether or not these solutions solved your problem.

Let me know if this article was helpful to you!

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