How to fix “Discovery – currently not indexed”

“Discovered – currently not indexed” means that Google knows the URL but hasn’t crawled or indexed it yet.

Follow this five-step process to diagnose and fix the problem.

If you only see a few pages with the “Discovery – Not currently indexed” issue, try requesting indexing through the Google Search Console (GSC). To do this, click “Check URL” in the menu and enter the URL of the page. If it is not currently indexed, click the “Request Indexing” button.

If everything is fine, you should see a message stating that the URL has been added to the priority scan queue.

If that doesn’t work, there’s almost always an underlying problem that you need to diagnose and fix before requesting indexing for the second time. So read on.

The crawl budget indicates the speed and number of pages a search engine wants to crawl on your site. If your crawlable URLs exceed your crawl budget, you may see a “Discovered – Not currently indexed” warning.

According to Google’s Gary Illyes, 90% of sites don’t have to worry about it. However, while crawl budget issues tend to affect larger sites, specific technical configurations, problems and errors can cause problems on smaller sites.

Let’s look at some things that can lead to crawl budget issues and how to improve them.

Do you serve content from subdomains?

Let’s say your main website is live example.com, but you have resources on a subdomain like cdn.example.com. In this case, the resource subdomain can be considered part of your main website and grouped for the crawl budget.

To fix this, consider offering resources from a CDN URL with a separate crawl budget.

Got unnecessary redirects?

Typically, when we decide to remove a page from the website, we add a redirect to another relevant page. However, this is not always necessary. Unless the page has backlinks or traffic, it’s best to remove or replace internal links to the deleted page and return a 404.

Here is a flowchart explaining the process:

You can find redirected URLs with internal and external links for free with an Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account. Here is the process:

1. Scan your website with Ahrefs Site Audit
2. Go to the last scan
3. Go to Redirects report
4. Click the number of internal URL redirects
5. Add columns for “No. of all inlinks” and “No. of referring domains”

Do you have duplicate content?

Duplicate content is when you have close or exact copies of pages accessible to multiple URLs. Examples included:

• The same pages are accessible to the www and non-www versions of your site, as well as HTTPS and HTTP.
• Development or staging instances.
• Blank pages of products or categories with standard content.

How you resolve duplicate content issues depends on the circumstances.

Find out more: Duplicate content: why it happens and how to fix it

Have you used internal nofollow links?

Nofollow links will not prevent the page from being indexed. However, their internal use tells search engines that a page is not important.

Here’s how to find pages with internal nofollow links for free using AWT:

1. Scan your site with Site Audit
2. Go to Connections report
3. Click on the “Problems” tab.
4. Look for the warnings and warnings “Page has only internal nofollow inbound links” and “Page has internal nofollow and dofollow inbound links”

If the page is important, replace nofollow links with followed ones.

Do you have orphan pages?

If the only way to discover your new page is from the sitemap and it has no internal links, Google may consider it unimportant.

I’ll talk about this in more detail below when I talk about internal links.

Google doesn’t index everything it finds. It prioritizes high-quality, unique and engaging content. Since Google has not yet crawled the pages with this warning, it cannot know if the content is low quality or not. However, he may have an idea based on similar pages that have already been scanned, which is why he may have “deprived priority” of the scan.

Here are some types of content that Google is unlikely to index:

• Automatically translated content – Translations will be far from perfect if you use Google Translate API or similar to localize content. If so, it’s not particularly useful for researchers.
• Yarn content – This is where you use the software to rewrite the content. The result is almost always low-quality plagiarized content.
• Content generated by artificial intelligence – AI-powered writing tools are gaining popularity, but they rarely create useful content without human involvement.
• Subtle content – These are pages without much unique content.

If any of these apply to your content, use the flowchart below to resolve the issue:

In short, if you have subtle content, combine it with other subtle content to create something useful or delete it. If not, improve the content. If the resulting content isn’t built for organic search, noindexlo so search engines can prioritize crawling more important pages.

Internal links are links from page to page on your website. Google often considers URLs lacking one or more internal links to be unimportant and may not index them. You can check if a URL has internal links for free with AWT. That’s how:

1. Scan your site with Site Audit
2. Go to Page explorer tool
3. Filter by “All pages” in “Content”
4. Add a column for the “No. of all links”

If you selected backlinks and / or sitemaps as URL sources when setting up your project, you may also be able to find some orphaned pages. Just go to the Connections report, click the “Problems” tab and look for the error “Orphaned page (has no internal inbound links)”.

You can also use Ahrefs to find internal linking opportunities between two existing pages. That’s how:

1. Go to Internal Linking Opportunity report in Site Audit
2. Enter a keyword related to the page you want to add internal links to
3. Choose “Keyword” as the search mode

For example, let’s say Ahrefs wrote a keyword research post. Entering “keyword search” you will find the pages on your site that mention that keyword and it will show you the context. You can then add internal contextual links where relevant.

Alternatively, you can search within the page text using Page explorer to find potential pages to link to when you publish a new page.

However, none of these tactics can replace a good website structure with logical internal links. It is something that every site should prioritize. However, if you’re having trouble, one way is to “hack” your crawl depth and make sure all of your internal pages are linked by an HTML sitemap.

An HTML sitemap is an HTML page that gives users a better picture of your website structure and an easier way to navigate. Unlike XML sitemaps, which are created to be parsed by different systems, HTML sitemaps are created for users. Although they are sometimes considered a thing of the past, they are still relevant.

If you have a large website, you might consider breaking it up into a logical structure, as you don’t want tens of thousands of URLs linked from a single page. Find out how LinkedIn does it to find inspiration.

Backlinks are one of the signals Google uses to decide whether a page is likely to be valuable and worth crawling. If your page does not have or has few high-quality backlinks, it could be one of the reasons why Google has “deprived priority” of the crawl.

Getting more backlinks is probably the hardest of all listed, but it pays off. Even a single valuable link can help Google discover your content and index it faster.

You can see how many backlinks each page of your website has for free with AWT.

If you want to check out a specific page, paste it into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and check the Overview report.

If you want to see which pages have or don’t have a lot of backlinks, enter your domain in Site Explorer and check the Best for link report.

If an important page has little or no backlinks, consider trying to build more.

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