This is not new, but hey, John Mueller from Google said it again, getting a status of Crawled/Discovered - Currently Not Indexed within Google Search Console's page indexing report may be a sign that Google doesn't think your site or those pages are high-quality enough to index.
Toren Ajk asked:
If a site consistently has a large % of Crawled/Discovered - currently not indexed pages is it best to noindex those pages, redirect them to relevant pages that are indexed, just wait, or something else?
John Mueller responded on Bluesky yesterday:
Usually this is a sign that Google's quality systems are unconvinced about your site (or convinced in the way that you don't want). Just making the site smaller doesn't significantly raise the overall quality of the site.
Toren then followed up and asked:
So building more trust signals is more important than optimizing the crawl budget. Is that a correct interpretation?
John replied:
I think those are very distinct things. If a tiny number of your sites pages are indexed, that suggests either a severe technical issue ("crawl budget" - which you would definitely notice at that scale), or that Google just isn't convinced about your site overall.
If Google does not feel it needs to place a page it discovered and crawled into its index, then Google does not think the page is worthy of including in its index.
Like I said, this is not new, here is our previous coverage:
- Google: Discovered vs Crawled Not Indexed Quality Issues & AI-Generated Content
- Google Discovered - Currently Not Indexed - Quality, Timing Or Server Speed
- Crawled - Currently Not Indexed: A Sign Of A Google Quality Issue?
- Google Discovered But Currently Not Indexed Help
Here is a screenshot of these posts:
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
