“Crawled – Currently Not Indexed” is a Google Search Console report that indicates that Google has crawled a web page but has chosen not to include it in its index.
The Crawled – Currently Not Indexed does not mean that there is an issue with your web page or that anything needs to be rectified, it simply means that Google has made the decision that it will not be displayed in the organic search results. This report is similar, but different to the ‘Discovered – currently not indexed’ status which indicates that Google is aware of a URL, but has not yet crawled or indexed it.
The index coverage report on the Google search console help centre provides the following information:
“The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.”
How to Address ‘Crawled – Currently Not Indexed’ Status
In some cases, Google has made the decision that a URL should not be indexed because it will not provide value to users in search results. Some of the most common website pages that are affected by the Crawled – Currently Not Indexed status include:
- Privacy policy pages
- Blog category pages
- Blog tag pages
- Paginated web pages
- Pages with duplicate content
If you have been affected and your page does not fall into one of these categories, here are some things that you can do to address and rectify the crawled – currently not indexed page status:
Improve content quality – ensure that the quality is unique, fresh, relevant, and provides real value to users. Google is much more likely to index content that it deems to be valuable to users.
Add internal links – if a page has been excluded from indexing, a good way to force Google to recrawl and understand the context and importance of a page is to add internal links. Find relevant landing pages, menus, or blog posts where you can link to a page so that Google is more likely to crawl and index.
Link building – nothing communicates relevance and authority quite like some high-quality backlinks. High-quality content attracts high-quality backlinks – creating link worthy content is an effective way to ensure your web page is crawled and indexed by Google.
Wrapping up
Fixing Google Search Console errors can seem like a daunting task. If you are seeing the ‘crawled – currently not indexed’ status, then you are not alone. Even the most technically sound websites will receive the same notification on some website pages. It is important to understand that you do not need to troubleshoot all pages in the error report, instead, identify the pages that will provide value to users and increase your website traffic and follow through on the above steps to ensure indexing.
