: What can cause "Discovered - currently not indexed" in the new GWT The new GWT shows sitemaps links divided into new categories. Two that confuse me: 1. Discovered- currently not indexed 2.

@Steve110

Google may discover and crawl your pages, but it does not mean that it will necessarily index them.

There are many reasons why Google might not index a page. Perhaps it found duplicate content. Perhaps it does not feel that it offers enough value for any specific search queries. Google may have found something about your page that it doesn't like.

Whatever the reason might be, Google just hasn't decided to index some of the pages that it has discovered and crawled on your site. It's pretty normal for some of your pages not to be indexed. Some of the pages on my sites aren't indexed despite it having better content than many indexed pages and having a substantial amount of internal links. Google's indexing system is a machine learning algorithm. And so it may decide not to index some pages sometimes for a variety of unknown reasons.

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@Odierno851

It is just part of the process. There is nothing for you to do until you actually get errors.

To understand the categories, you need to understand how indexing works which is something that is done pretty much continuously:


Googlebot fetches a page which means downloading its content onto Google servers. When this happens, the page is crawled.
It later puts the content of the downloaded page into the index. This means the page is indexed.
While crawling the page, it finds like and places them in a queue. Those links are discovered.


So:


Discovered not indexed means the link has been added to the queue of things that Googlebot may eventually crawl. Since the web is virtually infinite and there is a prioritization, it may never actually get there.
Crawled not currently indexed means that the page was downloaded onto Google servers but its contents have not been inserted into the index.

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@Nimeshi995

Even though Google discovered the URL it did not feel it was important enough to spend time crawling. If you want this page to receive organic search traffic, consider linking to it more from within your own website. Be sure to promote this content to others with the hope that you can earn backlinks from external websites. External links to your content is a signal to Google that a page is valuable and considered to be trustworthy, which increases the odds of it being indexed.

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@Cugini213

Googlebot has its own queue, based on different parameters. This is the message about those URLs are even queued.



Aj Cohn has a kind of funny opinion about the meaning of this message:


Discovered – currently not indexed seems to indicate that they see it
in your sitemap but based on how other content looks they’re not even
going to bother crawling it. Essentially, “Ya ugly!” Or, maybe it’s
just a representation of poor crawl efficiency.

Frankly, I’m not entirely sure that the definition of Discovered is
accurate since many of the sample URLs under this status have a Last
crawled date. That seems to contradict the definition provided.

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