Why would my pages be crawled but not show up in Google searches?

Wordpress Issues
1

My website’s pages are being crawled but still aren’t appearing in Google searches. Why might this happen, and is it worth trying to get them indexed? These pages keep showing up in my reports. Any advice would be appreciated.

2

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3
  1. Pages with no links pointing to them.
  2. Low word count, like under 500 words.
  3. Content isn’t seen as useful.
4

Leeland said:

  1. Pages with no links pointing to them.
  1. Low word count, like under 500 words.
  2. Content isn’t seen as useful.

I don’t agree – Google doesn’t care about word count. We have pages with just 50 words ranking high. And ‘helpful content’ is subjective – it’s not always clear-cut.

5

Could be because the content isn’t high quality. Are you using AI to generate it?

6

If the content is thin or too similar to what’s already in the search results, that could be why Google isn’t indexing it. Content quality is usually the main reason for this.

7

Usually, it means the quality could be improved. Try updating the content, add some FAQs, and remove any outdated info. Submit it again through Google Search Console. This happens to a lot of people, and sometimes Google’s algorithms are hard to fully understand.

8

It could be that the page is set to ‘noindex’, has a canonical tag pointing somewhere else, or has a duplicate title tag or duplicate content causing Google to skip it.

9

Probably because Google doesn’t think the content is valuable enough to index.

10

There are lots of reasons. Start by checking for duplicate content or pages that look too similar to each other. Linking to the page from important sections like your homepage or main navigation can help too. Sometimes, it’s just Google being picky. Try tweaking the content or meta description, then resubmit.

11

From my experience, it usually comes down to two things:

Authority

  • Not enough links, either internal or external, leading to the pages. Big sites sometimes solve this with an HTML sitemap, like how lyrics sites organize their content.

Too similar to other pages

  • If your page is too much like others out there, Google might skip it. Adding something unique, like a new perspective or recent stats, can help. Google has patents on information gain, so fresh content is preferred. And yes, it costs Google to crawl everything, so they’re being selective.
12

It’s most likely because of a lack of authority. If Google can crawl it, then it’s almost certainly a matter of authority or relevance.

13

Check in Google Search Console (GSC) – it usually tells you why pages aren’t getting indexed. And yes, it’s really important to get your pages indexed if you want them to show up in search results.

14

Mason said:
Check in Google Search Console (GSC) – it usually tells you why pages aren’t getting indexed. And yes, it’s really important to get your pages indexed if you want them to show up in search results.

Actually, GSC mostly tells you if there’s a technical problem. It doesn’t cover all cases of ‘crawled but not indexed’.

15

@Alexa
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16

@Mason
That’s different – that’s a redirect issue, not ‘Crawled - currently not indexed’ which the original question is about.

17

@Mason
Yeah, GSC won’t tell you why pages aren’t indexed except for technical errors.

18

Jeneta said:
@Mason
Yeah, GSC won’t tell you why pages aren’t indexed except for technical errors.

Got it. I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying.