Why Google is not indexing your pages: common causes

When Google crawls a page and chooses not to index it, there is almost always a pattern. The quickest route to the cause is to look at the missing pages as groups rather than one by one, because a single cause usually explains dozens of pages at once.

The usual causes

1. The page is a near-duplicate of another page Google prefers
2. The content is thin or adds little over similar pages
3. A noindex tag or robots rule blocks it
4. The canonical tag points somewhere else
5. The page is hard to reach from the rest of the site
6. The page depends on scripts that did not run when Google rendered it
7. The site has too many low-value pages, so the valuable ones wait

How to find your cause

Export the pages Search Console reports as not indexed, sort them by template or section, and look at what each group has in common. Then open a typical page from each group and check it against the list above.

What the common reasons mean

• Crawled, currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth storing yet, often because of thin or duplicate content
• Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the page exists but has not fetched it, often a sign of a site with too many low-value pages
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google chose a different page as the main version
• Excluded by noindex: a tag or header is telling Google to leave it out

Fixing it

Fix the cause for the group, not the individual page: merge or improve near-duplicates, correct canonicals, remove accidental noindex tags, link to the pages that matter, and prune the pages that do not.

Confirming the fix

Resubmit a sample from each group once the change is live, then check the index again after a few weeks. Report the share indexed, not the number of changes made.

This is the heart of our technical SEO work, and the technical SEO checklist walks through the same steps in order.