Skip to content
IndexMeNow
Sign in

Guide

Discovered – currently not indexed: why Google has not crawled your page

2 min readPublished

“Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google has found the URL, usually through a sitemap or a link, but has not crawled it yet. Nothing has been judged about the page, because Google has not looked at it.

The usual reason is priority. Google decides how much to crawl on each site, and a page with weak signals can wait a long time.

What it means, and what it does not

The status is about crawling, not quality. Compare it with Crawled – currently not indexed, where Google has already read the page and decided against it.

It is also different from URL is unknown to Google, which means Google has not discovered the URL at all. That is a discovery problem: no links lead to the page and it is not in a sitemap Google has read.

Why Google waits

  • Crawl priority. Google spends its crawl effort where it expects the most value. A new or small site, or a page deep in the structure, ranks low.
  • A lot of URLs. Sites that expose thousands of parameter, filter or archive URLs spread the crawling thin.
  • Slow or unreliable servers. If responses are slow or fail now and then, Googlebot backs off.
  • Weak signals about the page. Few internal links and a thin site make a URL look unimportant.

How to get the page crawled

  1. Link to the page from prominent, already indexed pages such as your home page, hub pages and related articles, using descriptive anchor text.
  2. Keep your XML sitemap clean. List only canonical, indexable pages that return 200, and keep lastmod accurate. See how to create and submit a sitemap.
  3. Reduce URL bloat. Stop generating endless parameter, session and faceted URLs, or block the pointless ones.
  4. Improve server speed and stability, and fix recurring 5xx errors.
  5. Raise the value of the site as a whole: fewer thin pages, more pages worth crawling.
  6. Request indexing for the page once, in URL Inspection, after the above.

If the status is “URL is unknown to Google”

Make sure the page is linked from an indexed page and listed in a submitted sitemap. Fetching a page with a crawler, or seeing it once, is not the same as Google knowing about it. Once Google has found it, the status moves to “Discovered” or beyond.

Keep reading