Google’s Martin Splitt posted a video in his SEO Made Easy series on the topic of the Google Search Console “Discovered – Currently Not Indexed” page indexing report status note. In short, there are three primary reasons you’d see pages in this category, they are:
(1) Quality issues with those pages
(2) Your server is slow for Googlebot
(3) Google just needs more time to index those pages (may be related to #2 above).
On the quality issue, Martin Splitt said, “When Google Search notices a pattern of low quality or thin content on pages, they might be removed from the index and might stay in discovered.”
“Googlebot knows about these pages but is choosing not to proceed with them,” because they are not high quality enough, he explained. He added, “If Google Search detects a pattern in URLs with low-quality content on your site, it might skip these URLs altogether, leaving them in is discovered as well.”
What can you do? “If you care about these pages you might want to rework the content to be of higher quality and make sure your internal linking relates this content to other parts of your existing content,” he said. So make sure to look at the content and improve it but also see what pages you can link that content to from other pages that are already indexed.
To be clear, Google’s help documentation for discovered – currently not indexed only really mentions server issues. It reads:
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. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.
But as we covered back in 2018, we know it is also about quality issues. So this is not new, but it is nice to have a video on this.
Here is the video: