Indexing Problems

# Indexing Problems

A page being crawlable does not guarantee it gets indexed. Indexing is a separate step, and pages can fail it for reasons that have nothing to do with whether Google can technically reach them.

## Why Google Skips Indexing a Page

– **Thin or low-value content.** Google increasingly chooses not to index pages it judges as offering little unique value, even when nothing is technically broken.
– **Duplicate or near-duplicate content.** If a page is too similar to another page on the site, or to content elsewhere on the web, Google may index only one version and skip the rest.
– **Canonical tags pointing elsewhere.** A page with a canonical tag pointing to a different URL tells Google that the other URL is the one to index, which can cause the current page to be excluded even if it should not be.
– **New pages that have not been discovered yet.** A page with no internal links pointing to it, and not included in the XML sitemap, may simply not be found yet.

## How to Check

Search Console’s Page Indexing report labels each excluded page with a specific reason: “Crawled, currently not indexed,” “Discovered, currently not indexed,” or “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” are the most common and each points to a different fix.

## What to Fix

For “crawled but not indexed,” the usual fix is improving the content itself, since Google saw the page and decided it was not worth indexing. For “discovered but not indexed,” the fix is often internal linking and sitemap inclusion. For duplicate-canonical issues, the fix is either differentiating the content or confirming the canonical points to the right page on purpose.

## Next Step

If pages on your site are not showing up in search despite being live, [get in touch](/technical-seo-services/) for a direct look at why.