GSC Crawled But Not Indexed Analysis: When Can You Ignore It?

Understand the meaning of "Crawled - currently not indexed" status in Google Search Console, and when to address or ignore these issues.

Main Topic

This article explains the reasons for "Crawled - currently not indexed" or "Discovered - currently not indexed" statuses in Google Search Console, and which situations you can ignore these statuses versus which ones require attention.

Key Points and Facts

"Not Indexed" Status in GSC

Google Search Console (GSC) showing statuses like "Crawled - currently not indexed" or "Discovered - currently not indexed" for non-content links that you don't want search engines to index is completely normal.

Why Does This Happen?

  • Non-content pages: Your website may contain many functional pages such as login pages, registration pages, user profile pages, shopping cart pages, admin backend pages, etc. These pages typically don't contain content that users can directly consume and have no direct search value for search engine users.
  • Crawler behavior: Google's crawler will attempt to crawl all links it can find, even if those links point to pages you don't intend for it to index.
  • Duplicate/low-quality content: Sometimes, GSC may also choose not to index pages because it judges the content to be duplicate or of low quality, but this usually applies to content you want to be indexed.

Situations You Can Ignore

If these "not indexed" links are indeed:

  • Functional pages (such as login, registration, settings, etc.)
  • Pages that can only be accessed after user login
  • Backend management pages
  • Pages that genuinely lack search value
  • Pages you've actively blocked using noindex tags or robots.txt

Then you can completely ignore the "not indexed" status of these links in GSC. This is actually the result you want, as it prevents search engines from showing irrelevant pages to users and helps search engines more efficiently crawl and index your truly important content pages.

When Should You Pay Attention?

You should pay attention when:

  • Important content pages (such as articles, product pages, category pages, etc.) that you want indexed also show a 'not indexed' status.
  • Pages showing an 'Excluded' or 'Error' status, especially those you want to be indexed. This may indicate more serious issues like server errors, pages being actively blocked, or content quality problems.

Conclusion

For non-content links that you explicitly don't want indexed, the "not indexed" status in GSC reports is not a problem, but rather indicates that search engines have correctly identified these pages should not appear in search results. So, continue to focus on the indexing status of valuable content pages on your website that need to be indexed.