Search Visibility
Most Of That Report Is Not An Error
The page indexing report is read as a list of errors and is mostly a list of decisions. Five of the statuses that look most alarming carry Google's own instruction that nothing needs doing, and the one that genuinely matters is easy to miss because it does not sound like anything.
Start here
Which One Is You
Three ways this report causes trouble, and only one of them is the report.
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01
The report is full of red
Read the wording rather than the colour. Several of the largest buckets are Google recording a decision it has already made, and it says so in the description.
The ones to leave alone -
02
A page you care about is not indexed
Which status it sits under decides everything, and two of them look almost identical while meaning opposite things.
Crawled against discovered -
03
Somebody quoted you to fix it
Check how many of the URLs in the quote are under a status Google describes as needing no action. On most sites that is most of them.
What is actually actionable
The five
Google Says These Need Nothing Doing
Five statuses, each quoted from Google's own description of it. Read them together and the report changes character.
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Alternate page with proper canonical tag
Google
This page correctly points to the canonical page, which is indexed, so there is nothing you need to do.
This is the report telling you your canonicals are working. It is arguably the single most reassuring line in Search Console and it sits in a section people read as a problem list.
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Duplicate without user-selected canonical
Google
Google has chosen the other page as the canonical. This is not an error, but is working as intended.
Google picked a canonical because you did not. If you agree with its choice, nothing needs doing. Marking a canonical yourself is worth it only where you disagree, and disagreeing is rarer than it sounds.
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Crawled, currently not indexed
Google
The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.
The most misread line in the report. It is not a rejection and it is not permanent. Resubmitting is explicitly described as unnecessary, which is exactly what most people do first and repeatedly.
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Discovered, currently not indexed
Google
The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl.
Note the cause Google gives: your server, not your content. Where this bucket is large the useful question is about hosting and response times, not about rewriting pages.
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Page with redirect
Google
This is a non-canonical URL that redirects to another page. As such, this URL will not be indexed.
A redirect working correctly. Every site that has ever changed a URL will have these, and the count grows with age rather than with any problem.
What this does to a quote
Between them these commonly account for the great majority of everything in the report. A quote priced by the number of affected URLs, without separating these out, is a quote priced against Google recording that things are working.
The pair that matters
Crawled Against Discovered
Two statuses read almost identically and point in opposite directions. Telling them apart is most of the value in this report.
| Crawled, currently not indexed | Discovered, currently not indexed | |
|---|---|---|
| What happened | Google fetched the page and read it. | Google found the URL and has not fetched it. |
| What it points at | A judgement about the page. It was seen and not selected. | A capacity question. Google rescheduled rather than risk overloading the site. |
| Where to look | The page itself. Is it distinct, is it substantial, does anything link to it. | The server. Response times, hosting, and how many URLs you are asking to have crawled. |
| What not to do | Resubmit repeatedly. Google says there is no need. | Rewrite the content. Nothing has read it yet. |
The expensive mistake
The commonest expensive mistake on this report is rewriting content that sits under Discovered. Nothing has looked at that content. The work cannot have any effect on the status, and the real cause is somewhere the content team does not own.
Worth acting on
What Is Actually Left
What is genuinely worth acting on, in the order worth acting.
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01
A page you care about is not indexed at all
Start with whether it should be. Most sites have far more pages than they have things worth saying, and an unindexed page that nobody would ever search for is not a problem to solve.
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02
Something important is excluded by a directive
Noindex, a robots.txt block, or a canonical pointing somewhere unintended. These are the true errors on the report, and they are almost always someone's deliberate change from years ago that outlived its reason.
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03
Discovered is large and growing
Read it as a crawl budget and server capacity signal. It is one of the few places Search Console comments on your hosting, and it does so without ever using the word.
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04
Google picked a canonical you disagree with
Rare, and worth fixing when it happens, because it means the version being shown is not the one you would choose. Mark the canonical yourself rather than leaving the choice open.
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05
Server errors and soft 404s
Genuinely broken. These are the statuses that mean what they appear to mean, and they are usually a much smaller number than everything above them.
Questions
The Ones That Keep Coming Up
Google says there is no need to resubmit the URL for crawling, and that the page may or may not be indexed in future. Repeated resubmission is the most common response to this status and it is the one thing the description rules out.
Google says it is not an error and is working as intended. Google chose a canonical because the page did not declare one. Act on it only where you disagree with the choice it made.
Google gives the cause in the description: it wanted to crawl the URL but expected that to overload the site, so it rescheduled. That points at server capacity and at the sheer number of URLs being offered, rather than at the content.
No. A non-canonical URL that redirects will not be indexed, which is what a redirect is for. The count grows naturally with the age of a site.
Ask how many of those URLs fall under statuses Google itself describes as needing no action. On most sites that is the majority of the report, and a price built on the raw count is a price built on Google recording that things are working correctly.
Server errors, soft 404s, and anything important excluded by a directive you did not intend, such as a stray noindex or a canonical pointing at the wrong page. Those mean what they look like. Most of the rest does not.
Where this came from
Every Quote On This Page
Search Console Help and Google Search Central, checked against the live pages on 10 September 2026.
- Page indexing report Every status and every description quoted above.
- Consolidate duplicate URLs with canonicals How Google chooses a canonical, and how to declare one yourself.
- Crawl budget management for large sites The capacity side of the discovered but not crawled status.
Been quoted to fix your indexing?
Send me the export. Sorting it into the three groups above takes very little time and usually shrinks the job by an order of magnitude. If there is something genuinely wrong in there, you will know exactly what.
