I spent three weeks submitting URLs to Google Search Console and watching my indexed count go from twelve posts to eleven. That was the moment I stopped treating submission as a strategy and started reading the numbers properly.

This is what the labels actually mean, and what I did about the one page that mattered.

The four "not indexed" reasons are not the same thing

Search Console lists rejection reasons side by side, which makes them look interchangeable. They are not.

On my site, 56 pages were outside the index, broken down as:

  • Discovered, currently not indexed: 36. Google knows the URL exists and has not decided to spend a crawl on it.
  • Redirect error: 18. Every one of these came from mobile Googlebot hitting a 302 to ?m=1 before my Cloudflare fix.
  • Crawled, currently not indexed: 1. Google fetched this page, read it, and declined to include it.
  • Alternative page with proper canonical tag: 1. Correct behaviour, nothing to fix.

Three of those are access questions. Exactly one is a judgment about the content.

"Crawled, currently not indexed" is a quality verdict

The label means the crawler fetched the page successfully and then decided it did not add enough to what the index already holds. It is not a penalty. The word "currently" is doing real work: the decision is revisited.

My one page with this label was /p/start-here.html. The URL inspection panel showed:

  • Last crawl: 28 October, 06:24
  • Referring page: None detected
  • Discovery: sitemap (with a "temporary processing error" line that turned out to be a per-URL artefact, not a sitemap failure)

Nothing on my site linked to that page and nothing outside it did either. A short "start here" page with no inbound links, no outbound links and generic advice was competing against a million pages saying the same thing more thoroughly. It lost.

The number that explains the whole stall

Open Search Console, then Settings, then Crawl stats. Two lines matter:

  • Requests per day. Mine: roughly 87 over 90 days, about one a day.
  • Purpose. Mine: 100% Refresh. Zero Discovery.

Refresh means Google came back to check something it already knew about. Discovery means it came looking for something new. In three months it never once came looking.

That single fact explains why 36 pages sat in "Discovered" and why index requests changed nothing. A crawler that only refreshes does not read new URLs, no matter what you submit.

What I actually changed

1. Internal links from pages Google already has. I added a block linking the three newest posts to all eleven posts that were already indexed. If nothing links to a page, the crawler has no path to it.

2. Made the dismissed page specific. It now names what the site is, when it started, how many entries exist, what has failed so far, and the numbers. It links out to the entries that explain each failure. Specificity is the part a stranger cannot copy.

3. Stopped the submission grind. Around sixty URLs requested over three weeks produced no measurable movement. I paused the daily batch rather than keep spending twenty-five minutes a day on something inert.

4. Fixed the actual redirect bug. The mobile redirect was turning crawler hits into 302s. That was a real defect and it is worth checking before blaming content.

The honest conclusion

A page can be perfectly reachable and still be rejected. When that happens the fix is in the page, not in the plumbing. And if crawl stats show zero discovery requests, the problem is bigger than any single page: the domain has not earned the crawler's curiosity yet, and that comes from other sites pointing at it.

Originally published on my diary: Crawled, Currently Not Indexed: What It Means and What I Actually Did