“Discovered – Currently Not Indexed” Status Can Last Indefinitely According to Google

Google stated there is no assurance that all Google SEO content will get indexed; thus, the Index Coverage report’s “Discovered – Currently not indexed” status for some SEO content in Search Console can last forever. This topic was discussed in the Google Search Central SEO Office-hours hangout on 18 February.

A person joined the live stream, asking Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller about the “Discovered – Currently not indexed” notification and how long it lasts. This notification indicates that Google discovered the page but has not crawled it yet.

There are various reasons Google may choose not to crawl a website, even after knowing about its existence. For one, it could be due to technological constraints. When Google tries to crawl a URL, the site could be too busy or overloaded. In this scenario, Google will reschedule the crawl for another day.

Another explanation for the “Discovered – Currently not indexed” message might be that Google does not think the website falls within a certain threshold for quality. The search engine company does not guarantee that they can crawl and index every page on the Internet. Even though Google is one of the world’s largest companies, it has limited computing resources.

Google’s crawler reserves computing resources for websites they think are valuable and of high quality. To that end, the “Discovered – Currently not indexed” status may be permanent.

Discovered – Currently Not Indexed Message

When asked how long a page remains discovered but not indexed, Mueller replied that it could be permanent. He said that Google does not crawl and index all pages, so it is entirely normal for a web page not to be indexed. Moreover, crawling new websites containing a lot of Google SEO content will take longer than usual, and many pages will remain discovered but not indexed.

Then, as time goes by, it often adjusts. The page could be crawled or indexed once Google sees real value in focusing more on the website itself. However, the search engine company does not guarantee anything.

For web pages that Google has discovered but hasn’t indexed yet, Mueller advised that the best thing to do is continue improving the website’s overall quality rather than leaving the content as is and waiting for it to get indexed one day. By doing so, Google’s system will recognise the value of the web pages and start crawling and indexing them.

Creating Awesome Content for Better Indexing

Mueller has previously announced on Twitter that Google sometimes considers the overall site quality when crawling and indexing web pages.

According to Mueller, Google needs to crawl the rest of the website to better understand its context. When asked how to persuade Google to index a website, Mueller responded that the website must have “awesomeness”. It just means that a website should be set apart from its competitors.

The notion of “doing it ten times better” is encouraging yet naively incorrect since more content does not imply that it is higher-quality. Another frequent mistake is to mimic the competition by utilising the same keywords and synonyms because then, it becomes rewritten content. Therefore, SEOs should not be so attached to stealing ideas from what ranks in the top ten. It makes sense to look at top-ranking websites, but it becomes questionable when an SEO starts to rewrite what exists.

If SEOs know the subject well and are experts at it, doing their best to write excellent content, perhaps Google will recognise that their site has a unique voice, and it will most likely get indexed.

More Important Content Gets Indexed

Mueller also stated that Google prioritises more important SEO content when it comes to crawling and indexing.

According to him, SEOs should make sure that users can quickly identify vital information on a website. This might necessitate focusing less on quantity and more on quality; the goal is to have fewer pages to be indexed.

He also said that Google considers internal links to understand what site owners consider important on their websites. Things like those linked from the site’s home page indicate essential pages so that Google might value them more.

External links also help send signals to Google about important pages. Mueller explained that if Google detects external links, such as links from social media, there’s a good chance that they will crawl and index those linked pages.

But it still depends on the type of external links. Typically, social media direct links have a no-follow, so the search engine company does not send any messages in their direction. And if they are useless or problematic links, Google may also disregard them.

It’s important to note, though, that if Google can determine that a page is truly significant, they will probably go crawl and index it further. Moreover, what most SEOs do not know is that Google forwards value to the rest of the website if they end up not indexing a page. This is because, once they’ve decided to exclude the page from their index, they will not have a destination for the links, so they can’t do anything with them for the rest of the website.

RSS feeds and site maps also aid Google in better understanding whether the web pages are newly published or updated recently. However, all these factors should be intertwined and work together because it is unlikely that excelling in one area in SEO would get web pages crawled and indexed.

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