We have created a lot of content on how Crawling and Indexing works. Here’s a quick summary of Indexing myths
- Most “indexing problems” are not technical errors. Google crawled the page and decided it was not worth storing.
- Google is trying to save money
- You can optimize crawl budget
- Less URLs = more time crawling your other pages
- More Crawling = more indexing or ranking
- Crawling and indexing are separate jobs. Fetching a URL does not put it in the index.
- “Crawled – currently not indexed” is usually an authority problem, not robots, noindex, 404s, 500s, or a bad canonical. Those have their own GSC labels.
- “Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google knows the URL exists and has not bothered to fetch it yet. Same root cause, earlier stage.
- More crawling does not mean more indexing. Sitemap pings and manual inspect requests do not force a slot in the index.
- You cannot really “optimize crawl budget” the way people talk about it. Google recrawls important, authoritative pages often and ignores the rest.
- There is no fixed crawl schedule. Strong pages may be hit in days. Weak pages may wait months.
- A sitemap is a hint, not a command. Weak, thin, or duplicate URLs in XML still get skipped.
- LLMs are not a second search engine with their own web-scale index. If traditional search will not store you, AI answers have less to cite.
- Schema, llms.txt, and “chunking for AI” do not buy indexation. They do not replace links, relevance, or unique value.
- Then do the unglamorous work: earn authority, link internally from pages that already rank, and make the URL add something the site does not already cover.
