Pages not in Google: the four usual causes

Search this problem and you will be told about crawl budget, log file analysis and internal link sculpting. All real, all irrelevant to you, because that advice is written for sites with tens of thousands of URLs.

Your site has fifteen pages. Google is not rationing its attention. Something else is happening, and on a site this size it is nearly always one of four things.

Cause 1: you told Google not to

Accidental blocking is the most common cause on small sites and the fastest to fix. Three ways it happens.

• A noindex tag left over from staging. Sites are built with indexing switched off and the switch is missed at launch. The symptom is dramatic: the whole site, or a whole section, missing.
• A robots.txt rule blocking a directory. Frequently added by a developer for a good reason and never removed.
• A platform setting. Most website builders have a discourage search engines checkbox, and it is on by default in some setup flows.

Check all three before anything else. It is ten minutes, it explains the cases where nothing at all is indexed, and it is the first thing a technical SEO check should look at.

Cause 2: nothing links to the page

If Search Console says Discovered, currently not indexed, or does not know the page exists at all, the usual reason on a small site is that no other page points at it.

This happens more than owners expect. A page built for a campaign, a service page dropped from the menu in a redesign, a location page linked only from a footer that was later rebuilt. The page is live, you can reach it by typing the URL, and nothing on the site leads there.

The fix is a link from a page that is already indexed, in body text, saying what the page is. Being in the sitemap is not a substitute; a sitemap suggests a page exists, a link demonstrates that it matters. This is covered properly in internal linking.

Cause 3: the page is thin, or it duplicates another one

This is what Crawled, currently not indexed almost always means on a small site. Google came, read the page, and decided against it.

That reads as harsh and it is usually accurate. The two patterns we find, over and over:

• A page with sixty words on it, a hero image and a contact form.
• One of a set of location or service pages that are the same page with a noun swapped. Google indexes one of them and declines the rest, which is exactly what you would do.

Neither is fixed by requesting indexing, which is the first thing everybody tries. The page has to become worth indexing, which means it has to say something the other pages do not. For location pages specifically that is a whole problem of its own.

Cause 4: it is pointing somewhere else

Two quieter versions of the same thing.

A canonical tag on the page naming a different URL as the preferred version. This tells Google to index that one instead, and it is a common side effect of a theme or plugin change that nobody connects to the disappearance.

Or a redirect. The page redirects somewhere, often to the homepage, often left over from a migration. You can still reach it because the redirect is invisible in normal use, and Google indexes the destination rather than the page.

What is not the cause on a fifteen page site

• Crawl budget. It applies to very large sites. Yours is not one.
• Site speed, unless it is so slow that pages time out, in which case you would notice using it.
• Not posting often enough.
• Domain age, in any form that you can act on.
• Anything a competitor did.

After you fix it

1. 01Request indexing through URL Inspection, once. Requesting repeatedly does not speed anything up.
2. 02Wait days rather than hours before checking again.
3. 03If a page was declined as thin and you have improved it, give it longer. It has already been assessed once.
4. 04Check your sitemap actually contains the page and returns it without error.

If a whole set of pages disappeared at once rather than never appearing, that is usually a launch or migration problem, and the redesign checklist is the faster route to the cause. Once a page is in, its description decides whether anyone clicks it.