Seeing the “Excluded” number rise in your Page Indexing report is enough to give any SEO anxiety. But in the modern agentic web, indexing issues are often diagnostic tools rather than failures. They tell you exactly how Google perceives the value of your content.
This guide decodes the most common error statuses and provides actionable fixes.
The Big Two: Discovered vs. Crawled
The most confusing distinction in GSC is between “Discovered” and “Crawled.” They sound the same, but they mean very different things for your infrastructure.
The Breakdown
| Status | Exact GSC Message | Meaning | Limit Bottleneck |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovered | Discovered - currently not indexed | We know the URL exists (from a link or sitemap), but we haven’t visited it yet. | Crawl Budget |
| Crawled | Crawled - currently not indexed | We visited the page, analyzed the content, and decided not to put it in the index. | Quality / Value |
If you have high “Discovered” errors, you need to improve your server speed or internal linking. If you have high “Crawled” errors, you need to improve your content quality. The “Crawled - currently not indexed” status is effectively Google saying, “We saw it, and it wasn’t worth the storage space.”
Common Error Table
Here is a quick reference guide for the other major errors you will encounter.
| Error | Reason | The Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Soft 404 | The page says “200 OK” but looks like an error page (empty content, “out of stock”). | Ensure pages with no content return a 404 or 410 status code. Add relevant content if the page is valid. |
| Redirect Error | Redirect chain too long, loop, or empty URL. | Use curl -I -L to trace the hops. Ensure no more than 3 hops. |
| Duplicate without user-selected canonical | Google found duplicates but you didn’t set a canonical tag. | Explicitly self-canonicalize every page. Use <link rel="canonical" href="..." />. |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical | You set a canonical, but Google ignored it because the other page was “better.” | Accept Google’s choice or significantly differentiate the content on the page you want indexed. |
| Blocked by robots.txt | You told Google not to look here. | If this is intentional, ignore it. If unintentional, check your robots.txt file for Disallow: /. |
The “Validate Fix” Button
Once you apply a fix, you can click “Validate Fix” in GSC. Do not spam this button. When you click it, Google queues a validation crawl. This takes priority crawl budget. If you validate before truly fixing the issue, you waste resources.
Validation Lifecycle
- Pending: Google is scheduling the crawl. (Can take 24 hours).
- Passed: The sample pages (usually 10-20) are fixed. The error count drops.
- Failed: Even one failure in the sample will fail the entire validation.
Conclusion
Indexing management is quality control. A healthy site should have a high ratio of Indexed to Crawled - currently not indexed. If your exclusion ratio climbs above 40%, you have a serious content quality problem that no amount of technical SEO can fix.