How to fix “Discovered – currently not indexed” on WordPress

We strongly recommend that site owners add a property to Google Search Console for every website they create, as soon as possible after launching. SEOPress users can add sites to Google using the SEO > Advanced feature.

The Page Indexing report in Google Search Console shows pages that Google has found on a website, which may include pages that are not indexed. “Discovered – currently not indexed” is one of the reasons Google provides for pages not being indexed.

Click on “Discovered – currently not indexed” to open the specific report on this issue. The report shows the evolution of the problem over time and provides examples of URLs with the problem.

Pages listed in this report exist on your website, but they are being ignored by Google. They are not in Google’s index and cannot feature in search results. When launching a new website, you may see all or a majority of your pages and posts listed here. This is not a good start for your SEO because while pages are not indexed, they cannot help you rank in Google.

Google says that pages show up here because “Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore, Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.”

In our experience, this is rarely the real reason. However, if your site is particularly slow, it may be the first explanation to look into. In Search Console, go to Settings > Crawl Stats to check that Google is not having problems crawling your site.

In our screenshot, the Host Status is good – but it may show that Google has had or is having problems. If problems are ongoing, you may need to contact your hosting provider. In some cases, servers accidentally block Google’s crawlers as part of their protection against attacks.

A more likely reason for “Discovered – currently not indexed” is that Google doesn’t like the content of your pages or is worried about its reputation. This may be a more common problem for sites that Google calls “YMYL” (Your Money or Your Life) sites, which include subjects like healthcare, financial services, and legal advice.

Visit the pages listed in the report. Do many of these pages have little or no content? Google may not want to crawl pages with minimal written content, and it can stop crawling an entire website if it discovers many pages with no content.

Is it possible that a lot of your content is copied from another source or produced by AI? Google may have detected this and stopped crawling your site, considering it of poor quality.

If you are happy that the pages contain enough helpful information, you may want to check that Google can crawl them correctly. Click on one of the links and then on the INSPECT URL link to show the URL Inspection report for the page. Click on the TEST LIVE URL button to request Google to crawl the page, and in the resulting report, click on VIEW TESTED PAGE and then SCREENSHOT.

The SCREENSHOT tab shows the page as Google “sees” it. This preview will often only show the start of the page, so don’t worry if you can’t scroll down to the footer. However, it should show the main content of your page and help you ensure it is readable.

If you are encountering problems with the preview, there may be an issue with your WordPress theme that is not allowing Google to correctly understand your site. Once it encounters such a problem on a series of pages, it may stop crawling.

Correcting Page with redirect issues

If everything looks good on your pages and on the preview provided by Google, then you can click on the REQUEST INDEXING button. Creating a Google Search Console account and submitting these manual requests can often solve the problem.

You can request indexing for multiple pages, but you will soon discover that it is a fairly slow process. To help ensure that Google indexes new pages rapidly, you should check the Google & Bing Instant Indexing solution by SEOPress.

If this doesn’t work or if you have concluded that you do not have enough quality content, check out Google’s guidelines on Creating  helpful, reliable, people-first content. You can self-asses exiting contents and get guidelines for producing content.

New sites that don’t have any backlinks may also find it difficult being indexed by Google and will find a lot of pages in the “Discovered – currently not indexed” report. If this is the case, check out our eBook Linkbuilding with WordPress to build links like a pro. Once your website is linked to from other websites, Google may start crawling it correctly.

By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.