Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed the Page Indexing Report and how it could be used to identify indexing issues. Of interest is how they tied quality to indexing, saying that quality isn’t just about the text on a web page.

Indexing Happens In Stages

Splitt and Mueller were discussing issues that could temporarily affect indexing such as a server not responding, that computers fail, DNS lookups sometimes fail, many reasons for why Google might not be able to crawl a site, then following up with the advice that not everything needs to be investigated.
Then they mentioned that when a site is new, the Page Indexing Report can show you the various stages of indexing that a page goes through.

Splitt explained how this works:

“And also, if you add or change your site, or if your site is very new, then you can actually also use this report to see a little bit how your site goes through the different stages.

Because at some point, you’re going to see pages in discovered currently not indexed, which tells you we know they exist, but we haven’t actually visited them. And if we haven’t visited them, we can’t put them in the index versus crawled currently not indexed, which means we visited them and we didn’t put them in the index. And that can have all sorts of different reasons.”

Lack Of Indexing Not Always A Quality Issue

At this point, the conversation turned to quality issues in the context of indexing and how that might have an impact. Mueller confirmed that this is not always about quality.

Splitt asked Mueller about the not indexed status in the Page Indexing Report:

“Would you say that that is often or only sometimes a sign of a quality issue?”

Mueller answered:

“Sometimes.”

Strong Concerns About Quality

Mueller explained that the not indexed status can be triggered if Google’s systems are “seriously worried” about quality. That sounds kind of strange for a system to be in a state of worry. What he probably meant is that if quality scores or some other indicator crosses a threshold, this can mean there’s a “concern” about quality related to the site.

Mueller continued his answer:

“So, it’s definitely the case if our systems are seriously worried about the quality of the website that they will reduce the number of pages at the index. Because if we have strong concerns about the overall quality, then it doesn’t make much sense for our systems to spend a lot of time on the website.

So we’ll probably crawl a lot less. We’ll index a lot less. And then you’ll see things like crawled not indexed or discovered not indexed, which from our point of view, is basically our system saying, we know about this and once we’re happy, we will take another look and see if we can index it.”

Page Not Indexed Not Always Because Of A Technical Reason

It’s not uncommon for a site owner to consider that there’s nothing wrong with their site, which leads to an inability to diagnose a page quality…


Source link

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.

Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]

 

 

Categorized in:

Blog,

Last Update: July 17, 2026