Google Search Console Almost Made Me Fix 7 Pages That Weren’t Broken

Page with redirect, blocked by robots.txt, crawled but not indexed. What they actually mean, and how to check in 10 minutes if your pages are really missing.

Friday evening. I open Google Search Console for one of my sites and the Pages report says 7 pages not indexed. The site only has 23 pages. That’s almost a third of it 😭

My first instinct was to start fixing everything. Glad I didn’t, because none of those 7 were actually broken. Here’s what they turned out to be, what each status means, and how you can check in 10 minutes if you actually have a problem.

So what does “pages not indexed” actually mean?

The number in that report is not “pages Google refuses to show”. It’s every URL Google has seen, minus the ones it decided to keep. And trust me, Google sees way more URLs than you think: the http:// version of your homepage, the version without www, your checkout link, your favicon.

So the first question isn’t “how do I fix this?” It’s “do I even want people to find this page?”

Here’s what my 7 actually were:

• 3 × Page with redirect: http://www.mysite.com/, http://mysite.com/ and https://mysite.com/
• 1 × Blocked by robots.txt: my checkout link (/api/checkout?plan=1)
• 3 × Crawled — currently not indexed: the favicon, the social share image and a font file

That’s it. All 7. Not a single one was a page I wanted on Google 💀

“Page with redirect” is not an error

A redirect basically says “this isn’t the real address, go there instead.” My site lives at https://www.mysite.com/. The other three spellings send visitors there with a permanent redirect.

Google follows the redirect and indexes the real page. The old address only shows up in the report to say “yeah I know this exists, but it points somewhere else, so I’m skipping it.”

What to do: nothing. As long as every version ends up at the same address, you’re good. Test it yourself:

curl -sI http://mysite.com/ | head -5

You want a 301 and a Location: header pointing at your main URL. If you see a 302, or a chain of three redirects, fix that. Clean 301? Close the tab and move on.

“Blocked by robots.txt”: just check it was on purpose

My checkout link is blocked on purpose. My robots.txt only blocks /download, /api/ and /_p/, and the checkout lives under /api/. Google has zero reason to crawl a link that starts a payment.

What to do: open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read it line by line. For every blocked path, ask: do I want this in search? If no, the report is right and you can move on. If a real page is blocked by a Disallow you forgot about, fix the file and ask Google to re-crawl.

The classic mistake: blocking a whole folder “temporarily” and then forgetting about it for months. Read that file once a month, seriously.

“Crawled — currently not indexed”: check the URL before you panic

This one scares everyone, because it sounds like Google looked at your page and said nah.

And for real pages, it kind of does mean that: thin content, a near-duplicate of another page, or a new site Google doesn’t trust yet. That’s worth fixing.

But look at what’s actually in the list first. Mine had a favicon, a share image and a font file. Google crawls those because your pages use them, but it never indexes them, and it shouldn’t. Nothing to fix here.

What to do: sort the list by URL. If it’s full of .png, .woff2, .ico and .js files, you’re done. If it contains real article or product URLs, that’s your actual to-do list.

The report might just be old

This is the part that almost wasted my whole evening. The Pages report is not live. Mine said it was last updated on 9 November. I was looking at it on 13 November. It was showing 6 indexed pages from four days earlier.

When I checked the 23 real pages one by one, 20 of them were already indexed.

The tool for that is URL Inspection, the search bar at the top of Search Console. Paste a full URL and it tells you right now, not four days ago, whether the page is on Google. If it says “URL is on Google”, you’re fine whatever the Pages table says.

So if your site is new, don’t trust the table. Use it to spot patterns, and use URL Inspection when you want to know “is this one page in or not?”

Check the sitemap date too

I also had the sitemap open. Google had last read it on 11 November, when it listed 11 pages. By then the site had 23. So for two days, Google didn’t even know half my pages existed.

Resubmit your sitemap after any big change: Indexing → Sitemaps, enter the sitemap URL, submit. It takes 30 seconds, and the “Last read” date tells you whether Google is looking at the current version.

Same thing happened on another site of mine. Its backend was down for a while in October. Search Console showed the sitemap as “Couldn’t fetch” from around 19 October until I resubmitted it on 12 November, and the number of indexed pages fell from about 10 to 1. Google doesn’t punish downtime. It just stops showing pages it can’t reach, then re-crawls them when they load again. But you only find out if you actually look.

What “Request Indexing” can and can’t do

After you inspect a URL that isn’t in Google, there’s a Request Indexing button. It’s useful, but it’s not magic:

• Google lets you make about 10 requests a day. I hit the limit on my third or fourth try on a day when I’d already used most of them.
• Requesting doesn’t force anything. It tells Google the page exists and asks it to crawl sooner. Google decides whether, and when, to index it.
• Bing is more generous. Bing Webmaster Tools let me submit 100 URLs in a day, and you can also use IndexNow, a protocol that pings Bing when a page changes. Even so, Bing has confirmed only one page of mine so far, the homepage. Bing is just slow with new sites.

Real talk: nobody can force Google or Bing to index a page. All you can do is make it easy to find, technically correct and actually worth indexing.

My 10-minute checklist

1. Read the reasons, not the number. Open each “Why pages aren’t indexed” row and look at the actual URLs.
2. Sort the noise out. Redirects, blocked-on-purpose URLs, images, fonts and scripts are fine.
3. Check the date at the top of the report. If it’s days old, ignore the totals.
4. Run URL Inspection on your 5–10 most important pages. Ignore the table.
5. Resubmit the sitemap if it’s older than your last big change.
6. Test redirects with curl. One clean 301 to one canonical address.
7. Only then, fix real pages that show “Crawled — currently not indexed” or “Discovered — currently not indexed”: make them longer, more specific, linked from other pages on your site.

Quick answers

Why does Search Console say my pages are not indexed?

Because it lists every URL Google has seen, including redirects, blocked URLs, images and fonts. Many of those aren’t meant to be indexed.

Is “Page with redirect” a problem?

No. It means the address redirects somewhere else. Make sure each variant has one clean 301 to your main URL.

Is “Crawled — currently not indexed” bad?

For real pages it means Google saw the page and didn’t keep it (often thin or duplicate content on a new site). For favicons, images and fonts it’s normal.

How often can I use Request Indexing?

In my experience, about 10 times a day per property. It asks Google to crawl, it doesn’t guarantee indexing.

Why does the Pages report show old numbers?

It isn’t real time. Check the “last updated” date and use URL Inspection for a live answer on one URL.

If you’re also building in public and learning this stuff the hard way, I post about it almost every day on X: @priyanshudotsol.

Originally published on Medium.