In Google’s Office-hours Hangout recorded on 18 February 2022, Google’s John Mueller disclosed that the ‘Discovered – Currently Not Indexed’ status may stay unchanged for an unforeseen period of time. What does this mean, exactly? It means that Google has discovered the website but has not yet been crawled by Google and therefore, will not be seen in the search results. There are innumerable reasons for Google not crawling a website including technical reasons at the website’s end but also sometimes at Google’s end. For one, Google’s server may have been overloaded the time it tried to crawl your website. Or it can be because your website simply doesn’t meet the standard required by Google. It may yet again reschedule crawling your website and may even index it. But there is no guarantee that it will do so. And that is why, the ‘Discovered – Not Currently Indexed’ status may potentially last forever.

How long can ‘Discovered – Not Currently Indexed’ status last?

When one of the viewers posed a question to John, asking the same, John answered.

“That can be forever. It’s something where we just don’t crawl and index all pages. And it’s completely normal for any website that we don’t have everything indexed. And, especially with a newer website if you have a lot of content, then I would assume it’s expected that a lot of the new content for a while will be discovered and not indexed.

And then over time usually it kind of shifts over, like well it’s actually crawled, or it’s actually indexed, when we see that there’s actually value in focusing more on the website itself. But it’s not guaranteed.”

How to fix ‘Discovered – Not Currently Indexed’?

John advised that rather than getting discouraged and leaving things as they are, hoping one day Google will finally crawl them, there are things you can continue to do at your end. He continued.

“So from that point of view it’s not that I would say you should just wait a little bit and suddenly things will get better with crawling and indexing. It’s more that, like continue working on the website and making sure that our systems recognize that there’s value in crawling and indexing more and then over time we will crawl and index more.”

There are other things that you can do at your end to ensure everything else is in place. Click the Test Live URL in Google’s URL Inspection Tool to confirm that the page in fact can be indexed by Google. You can try and improve the overall quality and site architecture to help Google understand your website better. This includes organizing your page’s content into proper sections and categories. Ensure there is no duplicate content on your website and that the content quality in itself is high and unique. Watch John Mueller’s full response to question at the 49:46 minute mark and may be also stick around for the rest of the discussion for some other valuable insights.

Source: Search Engine Journal