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How to Fix Search Console Indexing Problems

The Pages report in Search Console lists every URL Google knows about and why it is or is not indexed. It is the most actionable report in the tool and the most commonly misread, because several of the exclusion reasons describe entirely correct behaviour and look alarming anyway. This guide works through it in the order that resolves the most pages for the least effort, and covers how to run a validation that passes.

1. 1

   Read the exclusion reasons before fixing anything

   Open Indexing, then Pages, and list the reasons with their counts. Some of these are faults. Several are not: a page excluded by a noindex tag you deliberately set, or an alternate page with a proper canonical, is the system working. Separate the list into "wrong" and "intended" before touching anything.

2. 2

   Find where the dead URLs are coming from

   Large numbers of 404s usually have a single source rather than many. The most common culprits are an old sitemap still submitted from a previous CMS, an internal link in a template, or a stale feed. Finding the source fixes the whole group; fixing URLs one at a time does not.

3. 3

   Deal with soft 404s separately

   A soft 404 is a page returning a success status with nothing useful on it — an empty category, a search results page with no results, a thin placeholder. These need either real content or a genuine 404 or 410 status. Leaving them returning 200 keeps Google coming back to nothing.

4. 4

   Understand what "Crawled - currently not indexed" is telling you

   This means Google fetched the page and decided not to index it. It is a quality judgement, not a technical fault, and no amount of resubmitting will change it. The response is to improve or consolidate the page, or accept the decision. Requesting indexing repeatedly on these is wasted effort.

5. 5

   Treat "Discovered - currently not indexed" as a different problem

   Here Google knows the URL exists but has not fetched it. That usually points to crawl budget, site speed or a very large number of low-value URLs competing for attention. The fix is reducing the noise rather than pushing the individual page.

6. 6

   Check your canonicals where Google disagrees with you

   "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" means you declared one URL and Google picked another. Find out which it chose and why. Often the page you nominated is genuinely the weaker of the two, and the honest fix is consolidation rather than insisting.

7. 7

   Fix the cause, then submit redirects where pages genuinely moved

   For URLs that used to exist and now do not, a 301 to the closest equivalent preserves whatever value they had. For URLs that never should have existed, a clean 404 is correct and you should stop trying to rescue them.

8. 8

   Validate once, properly

   Only click Validate Fix after the underlying cause is resolved and you have confirmed the fix on a live URL with the URL Inspection tool. A validation that fails goes back into the queue and the next attempt takes longer. One careful validation beats three hopeful ones.

9. 9

   Re-check a fortnight later

   Validation takes days to weeks. Put a note in your calendar rather than refreshing the report. If the count has not moved at all after two weeks, the cause was not what you thought it was.