One of the reasons I recommend setting up Google Search Console (GSC) to everyone is that it shows you which of your pages are not indexed. Pages not indexed means that they are not being shown in the Google Search Results. This can be a problem if you’re working on your SEO.
There are other ways to find out if your pages are indexed, but getting the information directly from Google, including the reason why is fantastic!
This post will help you to find out if you need to take action or not when checking your not indexed pages. GSC sometimes sends “alarming looking messages”, which are actually not real issues.
How does indexing work
Understanding this, will help you with some terms that are mentioned later on!
Google uses programs (called ‘spiders‘ 
) that read (‘crawl‘) every website on the internet. These spiders don’t see websites the way we do (the aesthetic whole of colours, fonts, images, etc.) but only the raw code of them.
Based on the information provided by the spiders, Google decides which pages of each website to add to its huge database (the Google Search Index). This process is called indexing and it’s an ongoing operation because each day hundreds of thousands of pages are created in the world.
Next google uses an algorithm to determine which information from that database is shown to the people that are searching on Google.
Now that you know how it works, let’s check out which of your pages are NOT indexed!
GSC: Go to the “pages tab” under Indexing
After opening your Google Search Console, on the left side of your screen, under the section “indexing”, click on the “pages” tab. When doing so, you’ll see on the right side the option to learn more about indexed pages as well as a section that explains why pages aren’t indexed. You might have to scroll down a bit to see them all. Today’s post is all about the not indexed pages.
Why Pages aren’t indexed
Here is an example of what this can look like. Yours will look unique to your website of course. Keep in mind that initially GSC only shows 10 rows per page, so you potentially have to change that at the bottom of the page when you have more “errors”. Errors are relative, you’ll see why!
Excluded by noindex tag
A noindex tag is a piece of code that tells search engines not to show a page in search results. This is usually done on purpose! It can be done to avoid pages like: shopping cart pages, thank you pages, internal search pages and marketing pages from showing up in search results. In online stores it’s often used to avoid duplicate content.
So if you have this “error”, it might not be an error at all! In Google Search Console click on the item for a closer look and it will show you all the pages that have a noindex tag. You can determine if any of these are a problem or not.
Page with redirect
A redirect is set up when a url gets removed to avoid sending people to non existing pages on your website. You’ve probably seen a 404 page before. This happens when someone did not create a redirect for an old url.
It’s best practise to set up redirects and avoid 404 errors!
So you can already see why it’s not a problem that a url with a redirect is not indexed. You want the new url to be indexed, not the old and deleted one.
Here’s another example that a lot of people see with redirects:
In this example the website is https://, so the http://, http://www. and https://www versions are all redirected. This is all good! But might at first seem stressfull if you don’t know how this works!
So again, unless you accidentally set up a redirect, these are not errors!
Not found (404)
Google tends to have the memory of an elephant when it comes to urls. I’ve seen 404 errors appear in GSC for pages that have been deleted years ago. So if at any point in time you had a url, that now no longer exists, a 404 error might pop up in Google Search Console. Unfortunately there is no way to let Google know a url has been removed permanentely.
Best practise is to set up a redirect for these pages, pointing them towards other content on your website that best matches the old url. Setting up a redirect looks different depending on which platform your website is built on. For WordPress we love the free redirection plugin.
After setting up redirects, you can tell google to validate your fix!
Google also states that having some 404 errors is acceptable. Just keep your user experience in mind. Ideally no internal links to on your own website cause a 404 error.
URL blocked by robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file on your website that tells search engines which pages they can’t (and can) visit on the site. Similarly to the noindex tag, this might have been set up on purpose.
So check in Google Search Console if any of the pages listed isn’t suposed to be in there.
Discovered – currently not indexed
In order to understand this and the next section, you need to understand how Google Indexes pages. (check out this section of the blog)
In case of discovered but not indexed, the spiders haven’t crawled your pages yet. Google knows of the existence of them, but hasn’t checked out the content.
After clicking on the “discoverd-currently not indexed item”, you can see all urls affected. You can speed up the process by clicking on the “validate fix” button. (even though there’s nothing to validate) This way you tell google to go on and crawl these pages!
Crawled, currently not indexed
At this point, the Google spiders have crawled your page so Google knows what information is on your pages. But Google deems the information unsuitable to be added to the Google Index.
This can be a frustrating point to be stuck at if you actually want these pages to rank.
A couple of reasons why Google doesn’t want to index your page:
- not enough content (pages with only a few sentences sometimes get stuck in this stage)
- low quality content (repetitive, over optimized content or other quality issues)
- a disconnect between the H1 title, your title tag, the url etc. (unclear to google what this page is about/conflicting information)
- incredibly long url (I’ve seen this a few times, where just changing the url got a page indexed. Here’s what Google says about your ideal url structure)
So when you’re at this point, ask yourself what could cause Google not to like you content! And after fixing it, you can ask for a validation of your fix.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
A canonical tag is a piece of code that tells search engines which page is the preferred version of content. Most pages are self-canonical, meaning they point to themselves. (Most platforms automatically do this for you!) This ensures search engines know the page is the main version.
But in some cases if multiple pages have similar content, you can add a canonical tag to the less important page, pointing to the more relevant one. This helps prevent duplicate content issues and consolidates ranking signals.
So when you get this “alternate page with proper canonical tag” notification, this is usually not an error! This will show up when a canonical tag is set to another page. (f.e. in case of a mobile version of a page or ..)
Here is how to see which page the canonical tag is pointing to! First you click on the magnifying glass next to the url you want to investigate.
And next you get a more detailed information page, which shares what the user-declared canonical is, as well as the Google selected one! (In this case it’s the same, but with other errors it might not be)
Duplicate without user-selected canonical
In the previous section you could read what a canonical tag is. Now a duplicate without a user-selected canonical usually occurs when you have a two pages with the (almost) identical content, but different url.
This often happens with tag pages/category pages. But it can also occur with other content. If you don’t specify which of the urls is most important, Google will pick one. If you disagree with Google’s choice, you can add a canonical tag yourself. (This will look different depending on your platform)
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
Now in this case, you did set a canonical tag, but Google doesn’t agree with you! There can be a couple of reasons for that.
- For Google to accept your chosen canonical, the pages must be similar. If they’re not, Google won’t accept your chosen canonical URL as the main one. Duplicates need to be alike!
- Google might treat your URL as the main page (canonical), even if you tried to point it to another page when Google thinks your page is important/unique.
- Google might think the page is a copy of a different page, not the page you marked as canonical.
- Another similar page is performing a lot better (more traffic, engagment, more comprehensive, more upt to date, better UX etc.). Google could prefer this page as canonical.
- Conflicting canonicals may be overwritten. F.e. if you’ve manually set them and accidentally created a loop.
- Technical issues such as redirect chains/errors or typos in a canonical tag can cause Google to ingore your choice.
Similar to what I described in the section about Alternate page with proper canonical tag, you can take a closer look at which url Google prefers over your chosen canonical and analyze what might be the problem. If there is a problem! If the outcome is similar to what you intended (aka visitors to a certain type of page), you might just keep it as is!
Soft 404
A soft 404 error happens when a page looks like it’s missing (returns a “not found” message), but it still loads a regular page instead of a proper 404 error.
When Google crawls the page, it gets mixed signals – the content suggests the page doesn’t exist, but the server doesn’t send the correct “404 Not Found” status.
A couple of possible causes for this are:
- Broken or expired URLs f.e. deleted products, expired listings or old blog posts may load empty instead of get a 404
- Thin or empty content: pages with very little content or placeholders could be flagged as soft 404s.
- “Page not found” message, but 200 status: this can happen when the server says your page still exists, but the content says “missing. So there’s conflicting information for Google.
Blocked due to access forbidden (403)
A 403 error in Google Search Console usually isn’t a big issue. It often happens because the page requires users to log in or have special permissions to access it.
If this error shows up on pages that should be public, it’s something to look into.
Blocked due to other 4xx issue
Other 4xx issues exist. When you use the url inspection tool (the magnifying glass next to the url, you might have to hover to see it), GSC will tell you more details about the issue so you can troubleshoot.
Server error (5xx)
A 5xx error happens when the server can’t load the page. This is often a temporary issue caused by server overload or maintenance. However, if it happens often, it can negatively affect your site’s indexing and visibility in search results.
Common Causes of 5xx Errors:
- Server Overload – Too many visitors at once. (This can happen especially if you’re dealing with a “cheap host”! Read our post about web hosting)
- Maintenance Mode – The site is temporarily down.
- Misconfigurations – Issues with plugins, code, or server settings.
- Timeouts – The server takes too long to respond.
If you’re not computer savvy, contact your website host or web developer to take a look!
After fixing any of the issues: validate fix!
On any of the detail pages with a specific issue, you’ll see the option to validate the fix with a click on a button at the top of the page. Do this AFTER you’ve made changes to improve your site.
Of course a fix is only needed if it’s an actual issue! This is very annoying for those of us who like to see all “errors” disappear, but unfortunately there’s no way of removing “non issues” from Google Search Console.
Tip to get Google to index new pages faster
Hopefully if you now have a better understanding on what to do when you get a pages not indexed result in Google Search Console!
Here’s two tips to help you get new pages indexed faster!
Add your sitemap to Google Search Console!
An XML sitemap shares a list of URLs with search engines and metadata (such as when a page was last updated). A quick way to find yours is add /sitemap.xml at the end of your website url.
If that didn’t work, here’s a free sitemap finder tool.
Adding a sitemap to GSC will allert it faster to new pages and page updates.
Or if you prefer a video:
Submit an individual url for indexing
After writing this blog post, if I want Google to find it even faster, I can submit it manually for indexing in the “inspect url tool” at the top of any page in GSC!
Next you click on the “request indexing” button.
Good luck!
