During Google’s Office-hours Hangout recorded on February 18, 2022, John Mueller from Google revealed that the ‘Discovered – Currently Not Indexed’ status could remain unchanged indefinitely. What does this mean precisely? It indicates that Google has identified the website but has not yet conducted a crawl, preventing it from appearing in search results. Several factors can cause Google to postpone crawling a website, including technical issues on the website’s side or sometimes on Google’s end. For instance, Google’s servers may have been overwhelmed during the attempted crawl of your site, or your website may not meet Google’s quality standards. Google might reschedule the crawl and potentially index the site in the future, but there’s no guarantee that it will. Consequently, the ‘Discovered – Not Currently Indexed’ status may persist indefinitely.

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.”

You can take additional steps to ensure everything is in order. Utilize Google’s URL Inspection Tool and click “Test Live URL” to verify that Google can index the page. Consider enhancing your website’s overall quality and structure to provide Google with a better understanding. This entails organizing your page’s content into clear sections and categories, eliminating duplicate content, and ensuring the content is of high quality and uniqueness. For more insights, watch John Mueller’s complete response to the question starting at the 49:46 minute mark, and stay tuned for additional valuable information during the discussion.

Source: Search Engine Journal