Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?

[DanDeceuster]

Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed.

I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not.

So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed.

But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out.

Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?

[Chris.Menke]

I'd hold off worrying about it for now.  I've heard many people talk about slow indexation lately.  In the mean time,  aside from the obvious check-for- nofollow- noindex-robots.txt suggestions, have you looked into the history of this domain? By chance was it penalized before you bought it?

[Vanderlindemedia]

Perhaps the content on those 42 pages or so is alot copy content based? Or pages that really dont matter to be up in search?

[DanDeceuster]

It's a new domain, no previous ownership, and no issues detected in search console for manual actions or security. There's no robots, noindex or any of that going on. They just won't index a bunch of the pages for some reason and it's very odd.

[Vanderlindemedia]

Get quality links.

[DanDeceuster]

It's a review website, and only 3 of my 24 reviews are indexed. All are discovered, most even crawled, but only those three in the index. And when I updated them, the search listing in Google results was updated within a few days. So they came back, are aware of the changes, but just not adding the others to the index.

And there are no affiliate links on this site at all. No spam, no links to spam, and I've attached a blog with 500+ word well written articles (about 20 so far) and none of the blog posts are indexed either.

I've never seen anything like this. The content is good, but almost none of it is getting indexed for some reason, despite being discovered and crawled.

[DanDeceuster]

I actually got a quality link 2 weeks ago, but the blog post the link was published in still isn't indexed by Google either. The rest of his site is, just not his newest article for some reason, and it's 2 weeks old now. Another mystery...

[Vanderlindemedia]

My advice is, start listing more reviews! It will be picked up by google automaticly. You gotta be a bit more patient. New websites take awefully alot of time to be indexed.

I had a domain of 10+ years of age, replaced it's website, within one day completely reindexed. I have new domains, they can take up to weeks or even a month to be indexed. It's normal.

[willcritchlow]

Hi Daniel. Did you get this resolved / did it resolve itself? I'd happily take a look if you'd like if not - just let me know the URL.

[DanDeceuster]

We keep adding blog posts almost every day, still not getting in the index for some reason. Discovered, yes. Crawled, yes. But not indexed, and no errors or anything.

[DanDeceuster]

Hi Will, thanks for reaching out! No, not yet resolved. Still struggling to figure this out. I sent you a message on Facebook and Linkedin- would love to connect and try to get this figured out!

[Advanced-Air-Ambulance]

Hey Daniel. I agree with Chris. I have also noticed slow indexation recently. Might be a pain in the arse, but maybe you should request each page to be indexed individually in Search Console to add them to the high priority queue.

[DanDeceuster]

Thanks, I've actually submitted request to be indexed multiple times over the last 3 weeks to no avail.

[willcritchlow]

You're not the only person reporting odd indexation happenings here on Q&A (see for example this question). And, just like I found for that question, your site appears to have more pages indexed in Bing than in Google - which at least seems to point to us not having missed something obvious like meta noindex or similar.

I did also read Google saying that they had issues with the site: command (link) but I don't think that can have anything to do with your situation as they say they have now fixed that issue, and I couldn't find any other pages on your site even with non-site: searches (i.e. it does genuinely appear as though those pages are missing from the index).

While I am loathe to point just at links these days, I do wonder if in this case it is just a case of needing some more authority for the whole site before it is seen as big enough and important enough to justify more pages in the index.

[DanDeceuster]

Thanks Will, appreciate the insight. I'm going to get the Bing and Google wordpress plugins on there to see if that helps, build up a few more links and give it some time to wait and see. Thanks!

[willcritchlow]

Good luck!