If Google keeps discovering pages but not indexing them, the fix is usually to make crawling less onerous and the pages more worth crawling.
Anyone spending time in Google Search Console will sooner or later see a section called “Discovered – currently not indexed”. It sounds ominous; all it means however is that Google knows the URL exists, but has not crawled it yet, so cannot index it. Search Console’s own description says Google typically wanted to crawl the URL, but expected that doing so might overload the site, so it rescheduled the crawl.
So what should we do about it? Start by deciding whether we should care. If we’re talking about a handful of low-value URLs, the situation may resolve on its own, or it may simply not matter. But if the URLs are commercially important, or the list is growing, it is worth treating as a signal that Google is not confident enough to spend crawl resources on that part of the site.
Three common causes of the problem are as follows:
- If the server is slow or inconsistent, Google becomes cautious. Search Console’s definition explicitly points to overload risk.
- We’ve generated lots of thin pages, such as internal search URLs, tag pages or near-duplicate content. This can reflect quality and prioritisation of crawling and indexing.
- Google has found the URL (via sitemap or links) but sees little evidence it matters.
What about “Request indexing”?
For a small number of important pages, using ‘URL Inspection’ and requesting indexing can help nudge Google to fetch and process them. This is not a scalable solution, but pick one important example URL from the report, use URL Inspection to check what Google knows about it, and if the page is a keeper, strengthen internal links and ensure it is in the sitemap.
This is not glamorous work, but it is worthwhile. Remember though that “Discovered – currently not indexed” is often Google telling us, politely, that we have created more URLs than we have earned attention for.