Why your pages are crawled but not indexed
Why your pages are crawled but not indexed "Crawled, currently not indexed" in Search Console gets treated as one problem with one fix, usually "publish better content." The status covers several distinct failure modes, and content quality is only one of them. The other three are almost always visible in the server response itself, if anyone actually diffs what Googlebot receives against what a…
Why pages are indexed but not crawled
Googlebot fetched the URL and read the response, then made a deliberate decision not to add it to the index. This is different from pages that are discovered but not crawled, which can be due to budget or robots.txt issues. A canonical tag replacing the indexed URL is another possibility. The Search Console UI combines these into similar-looking rows, but the API provides precise data for checking hundreds of URLs.
The URL Inspection API, accessed through a POST request, reveals the index status and other details for a single URL. However, the quota is limited, so running a full-site sweep requires a slow batch process. Space the calls and cache the results, as page status can change slowly. The canonical fields are the first thing to compare.
If they disagree, Google chose a different URL to index. When they agree but the page still isn't indexed, check if Googlebot and a regular visitor are looking at the same document. Served different HTML by user agent or serving different content due to JavaScript-rendered content can cause this. JavaScript-rendered content is harder to diagnose, as Googlebot only sees the final rendered DOM.
Redirect chains can also cause indexing issues, but they compete for crawl budget and may have divergent canonical tags or status codes. Checking these factors in order helps determine if Google can index the page before deciding if it should. This analysis comes from Nooralto, a web and SEO studio in Agadir and Paris.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
