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'Crawled - currently not indexed' spike followed by search traffic drop

by Gustaf
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've noticed an interesting pattern that appears consistently, especially on large content-heavy sites.
Websites with a significant number of pages in the "Crawled - currently not indexed" status in GSC often get hit by an algorithmic filter and experience a drop in traffic after the next Google update.

The likelihood increases when the number of crawled-but-not-indexed pages starts growing rapidly.
It's an early warning sign that the business might soon lose organic traffic.

Most common causes:
  • Large volumes of repetitive or thin content
  • AI-generated pages with little to no value (e.g., templated reviews on review sites or non-unique product descriptions on ecommerce sites)

Less common:
  • Poor or missing internal linking
  • Lack of backlink signals
  • Pagination issues
#– #crawled #drop #google penalty #indexed #penalty #search #spike #traffic #сrawled
  • Profile picture of the author Kwark
    I've seen similar patterns on a few sites I work with, especially when thin content scales too quickly or when internal linking doesn't help search engines prioritize what to index. Keeping an eye on that "Crawled - currently not indexed" metric in GSC seems like an early warning flag these days.
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    • Profile picture of the author Gustaf
      Yeah, some sites are still publishing massive amounts of articles, often just generated by AI. They assume this will bring in more search traffic. But then a Google update rolls out - and the exact opposite happens.. traffic drops significantly.

      The lack of proper internal linking between those pages only reinforces the signal to Google that this is classic scaled content abuse.

      Originally Posted by Kwark View Post

      I've seen similar patterns on a few sites I work with, especially when thin content scales too quickly or when internal linking doesn't help search engines prioritize what to index. Keeping an eye on that "Crawled - currently not indexed" metric in GSC seems like an early warning flag these days.
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      Google penalty recovery service for penalized sites, traffic drops, and deindexed pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author Willifrid
    I've encountered this on one of my websites. Some pages were deindexed by Google and marked as "Crawled, currently not indexed".
    Manually resubmitting them for indexing in Search Console didn't help, even though these pages had no blocking in robots.txt or anywhere else..
    Any ideas on how to fix this?
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    • Profile picture of the author Gustaf
      Originally Posted by Willifrid View Post

      I've encountered this on one of my websites. Some pages were deindexed by Google and marked as "Crawled, currently not indexed".
      Manually resubmitting them for indexing in Search Console didn't help, even though these pages had no blocking in robots.txt or anywhere else..
      Any ideas on how to fix this?
      To fix "Crawled, currently not indexed", you first need to determine the reasons why the pages aren't being indexed. Especially if they were previously in the index, and even more so if they used to have good search traffic.

      As I mentioned in the thread, the reasons almost always relate either to thin and not sufficiently original content or to an insufficient number of relevant internal links. Sometimes this is made worse by the absence of these pages in the sitemap - or even the complete absence of a sitemap, including in GSC. More details on the likely reasons: [Link Removed by Moderator ].
      Signature
      Google penalty recovery service for penalized sites, traffic drops, and deindexed pages.
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