Separate the report into things preventing a page you want indexed, and everything else. Most entries are the second, including nearly all of the excluded ones.

The report is a description, not a fault list

The indexing report tells you what happened to every address it found, which includes a great many things that were supposed to happen.

Pages you deliberately excluded appear there. Pages that redirect appear there. Duplicates appear there.

None of those is a fault and all of them are listed alongside genuine problems in the same interface.

So the skill is triage rather than resolution, and most of the entries need nothing done.

The ones that matter

The last two are the only ones that ever warrant urgency. A manual action or a security notice is an explicit message about your site rather than a statistic, and both should be acted on the day you see them.

The ones that usually do not

Which is most of the volume.

Pages excluded because you marked them not to be indexed, which is the setting working.

Pages that are alternates with a proper canonical, which is duplicate handling working.

Redirected pages, which is your redirects working.

Pages not found, where the address was one you removed deliberately or one somebody typed wrongly.

And crawl anomalies on a handful of addresses, which are usually transient.

Each of those appears with a count that looks alarming and describes something correct.

The two that need judgement

Since these are genuinely ambiguous.

Crawled and not currently indexed means the page was read and judged not worth including, which is a quality signal rather than a technical fault.

Discovered and not currently indexed means it has not been read yet, which on a large site is a crawl budget question and on a small one usually resolves itself.

For a small business the first is the informative one: a page in that state is being told it does not add anything.

The response is to make the page substantially better or to accept that it should not exist, rather than to resubmit it repeatedly.

Resubmitting a thin page does not change the assessment and is the most common wasted effort in this area.

A worked example

A business was alarmed by a report showing over four hundred excluded pages and had been quoted for work to fix it.

Sorting by reason, three hundred and forty were attachment pages excluded correctly, fifty were redirects working as intended, and eleven were pages they had deliberately marked not to be indexed.

Four were genuine: service pages that had been read and not indexed.

Those four were thin, near-duplicates of each other, and were merged into one page which indexed within a fortnight.

The four hundred needed nothing.

The quote had been for addressing all of them.

Start from your own list

Which is the reliable way to read the report.

Write down the pages you want indexed, which for most small businesses is between ten and forty.

Check each one is indexed, using the address inspection tool.

Anything on your list that is not indexed is a real problem, and anything not on your list is noise regardless of what the report calls it.

That takes fifteen minutes and it is a completely different exercise from working down the report.

It is also the only version that answers the question you actually have.

Watch trends, not totals

Since the absolute numbers mean little.

A count of excluded pages that has been four hundred for two years is a stable configuration.

The same count rising from forty to four hundred in a month is a change worth investigating.

So look at the shape of the graph rather than the figure, which is what the interface is actually good for.

Check it monthly, note the numbers, and investigate movements rather than levels.

Two figures written down each month is enough, and it converts the whole report from a source of alarm into a comparison.

The other reports have the same problem

Worth extending, since the pattern repeats.

Enhancement reports flag missing optional fields as warnings, which are frequently optional for good reason.

Mobile usability warnings are worth reading and are occasionally about a page nobody visits.

And performance reports show figures without context about whether they matter for your traffic.

The same triage applies throughout: does this affect a page I care about, and would fixing it change anything for a visitor.

Turn off the email alerts you do not need

A practical suggestion, since the alerts are what turn a monthly check into weekly alarm.

The tool emails when counts move, including when they move for reasons that are correct, so a business excluding four hundred attachment pages receives an alert about it.

Those emails arrive to whoever set the account up, who is frequently not the person who could act on them, and they train everybody to ignore the category entirely.

Keep the notices that are explicit messages about your site and reduce the rest, then check the reports on your own schedule.

An ignored alert is worse than no alert, since the one that mattered arrives in the same inbox looking the same.

The counter-case

Some warnings are early signals.

A rising count of server errors, even on unimportant pages, can indicate a hosting problem that will reach your service pages.

A growing number of pages crawled and not indexed suggests something about the site's overall assessment worth understanding.

And on a large site, crawl budget genuinely matters and the excluded counts are more meaningful.

Write your own list of pages that matter, check those are indexed, and treat everything else as description.

The fifteen minutes

  1. Write the pages you want indexed.
  2. Check each one individually.
  3. Act on anything on that list.
  4. Ignore excluded and redirected counts.
  5. Check for a manual action notice.
  6. Note the totals for comparison.
  7. Investigate movements, not levels.

Step one changes the whole exercise, since working from your own list answers whether your site is working and working from the report answers nothing in particular.

Getting the tool set up properly is covered in setting up search console the first time.

Frequently asked questions

What is the report actually showing?

What happened to every address it found, including a great many things that were supposed to happen: deliberate exclusions, redirects, and duplicates.

Which entries matter?

A page you want indexed that is not, server errors across many pages, and manual action or security notices. The last two warrant acting the same day.

Which usually do not?

Pages you marked not to be indexed, alternates with a proper canonical, redirected pages, not-found addresses you removed deliberately, and transient crawl anomalies.

What does crawled and not indexed mean?

The page was read and judged not to add anything. That is a quality signal, so the response is to make it substantially better or accept it should not exist.

Should I resubmit those pages?

No. Resubmitting a thin page does not change the assessment and is the most common wasted effort in this area.

What is the reliable way to read it?

Write down the pages you want indexed, usually ten to forty, and check each one individually. Anything not on your list is noise regardless of what the report calls it.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Four hundred excluded pages in your report?

Write your own list of pages that matter and check those instead. It is usually a much shorter job.

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