Search Console coverage issues: how to read the indexing report

Sort reasons before you panic

‘Excluded by noindex’, ‘Blocked by robots.txt’, ‘Not found (404)’, ‘Page with redirect’, and ‘Crawled — currently not indexed’ are different jobs. A rise in redirects after a migration can be success. A rise in noindex on service pages is an incident.

Open the example URLs. The report is only useful once you recognise the template they share.

Fix the reason that affects canonical pages

Prioritise indexable URLs you care about that are excluded or crawled but not indexed. For ‘crawled — currently not indexed’, improve the page’s distinct answer and its internal links, then request indexing for a representative URL.

Do not try to get every excluded URL indexed. Filters, thank-you pages, and old parameters should stay excluded.

• Group sample URLs by template.
• Leave intentional exclusions alone.
• Request indexing after the cause is fixed, not before.

Use the report as a regression alarm

A sudden jump in ‘Excluded by noindex’ or server errors after a deploy is a launch bug. Compare the date with the release, then check the live robots meta and status codes.

Coverage will not tell you why a page ranks poorly. It tells you whether the URL is available to rank at all.

What does ‘Crawled — currently not indexed’ mean?

Google fetched the URL and chose not to index it. The page may be thin, duplicate, or poorly linked. Make it distinct and connected, then ask for another crawl.

Should you request indexing for every excluded URL?

No. Request indexing for canonical pages after the underlying issue is fixed. Requesting indexing of junk URLs fights the cleanup.