Why are my pages not indexed?

If the site is verified in Google Search Console, the Page indexing report states, per URL, whether it is indexed and if not, the reason Google recorded — blocked by robots.txt, excluded by noindex, duplicate, crawled but not indexed, discovered but not crawled.

Nothing else gives you Google's own view, and it turns a guess into a category. Everything below is how to act on what it says.

`robots.txt` disallowing the path. The page is never fetched. Note the trap: a blocked page never sees its own noindex, so blocking is not a way to remove a page from the index.

The page returns 404 or 5xx.

No internal link points at it. A page reachable only from the sitemap is discoverable but weakly signalled.

It is behind a login, or behind a challenge that an automated client cannot pass.

`<meta name="robots" content="noindex">` in the HTML.

`X-Robots-Tag: noindex` in the response headers — same effect, not visible in the page source, and consequently the version that survives longest.

A noindex left from a staging environment is the single most expensive fault in this list, and it produces no visible symptom on the site.

A canonical tag pointing at another URL is a request not to index this one.

Near-identical content across several URLs leads search engines to pick one, and it may not be the one you expected.

Search Console reports this as "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical", which names the URL it picked.

"Crawled — currently not indexed" means Google fetched the page and decided not to index it. This is a quality judgement, not a bug.

Common on thin pages, automatically generated pages, and near-duplicates that differ only in a parameter.

The remedy is editorial, not technical: fewer, more substantial pages. Re-submitting the URL does not change the judgement.

It is also the reason mass page generation backfires — the pages are crawled, judged, and dropped, having consumed crawl budget on the way.

It reports the technical half across every page it crawls: `seo.robots_txt`, `seo.noindex`, `seo.canonical`, `seo.sitemap`, `availability.status_classification`, and which pages it could not reach and why.

The crawl reveals the structural cause Search Console cannot: pages in the sitemap that no internal link reaches, and pages reachable by link that the sitemap omits.

What it cannot tell you is whether Google judged a page worth indexing. That is Google's decision, reported only in Search Console, and no external tool has access to it.

Two habits waste more time on this problem than any technical fault, and both feel productive.

Re-submitting URLs. The URL inspection tool's request-indexing button asks for a re-crawl; it does not change a judgement. Using it repeatedly on a page that was crawled and not indexed re-asks a question that has already been answered.

Waiting. "Discovered — currently not crawled" on a small site usually means the page is weakly linked rather than queued, and time alone does not add a link.

What does help, in rough order of effect: link to the page from somewhere that is itself crawled regularly, which is the single most reliable intervention. Make sure it is in the sitemap, and that the sitemap is submitted and free of URLs that 404 or redirect. Check that the page is not canonicalising elsewhere and not disallowed. Then, if the category was "crawled and not indexed", change the page — merge it with something related, or give it substance it did not have.

There is also a case where the honest answer is that the page should not exist. A site that generated three thousand near-identical pages and finds that Google indexed four hundred of them has been given an accurate assessment, and the productive response is fewer pages rather than more submissions.

Google documents that indexing is not guaranteed for any URL. That sentence is easy to skip past and it is the whole of the answer: indexing is a decision made about each page, not a service owed to it.