Google Reveals Why Pages Are Crawled but Not Indexed
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Google Reveals Why Pages Are Crawled but Not Indexed

Google Explains Reasons For Crawled Not Indexed -: "Google's Gary Ilyes provided several causes of the dreaded crawled but not indexed errors."

Back in May Google’s Gary Illyes sat for an interview at the SERP Conf 2024 conference in Bulgaria and answered a question about the causes of crawled but not indexed, offering multiple reasons that are helpful for debugging and fixing this error.

Reason For Crawled – Currently Not Indexed

Crawled Currently Not Indexed is a reference to an error report in the Google Search Console Page Indexing report which alerts that a page was crawled by Google but was not indexed.

Google’s search console documentation doesn’t provide an answer as to why Google may crawl a page and not index it, so it’s a legitimate question.

Gary Illyes answered that yes, one of the reasons could be that there is already other content that is similar. But he also goes on to say that there are other reasons, too.

General Quality Of Site Can Impact Indexing

Gary then called attention to another reason why Google might crawl but choose not to index a site, saying that it could be a site quality issue.

Other Reasons For Crawled Not Indexed

Gary next offered other reasons for why URLs might be crawled but not indexed, saying that it could be that Google’s perception of the site could have changed but that it could be a technical issue.

Takeaways

Gary provided answers that should help debug why a web page might be crawled but not indexed by Google.

  • Content is similar to content already ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
  • Exact same content exists on another site that has better signals
  • General site quality issues
  • Technical issues

Source-: Google SERP's & SearchEngineJournal


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