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I had a number of pages that Google's Search Console had marked as "Discovered - currently not indexed" 2 weeks ago, and so I clicked "Validate Fix" in the hopes of having the pages properly indexed. Once Google told me the fix had been validated, the pages disappeared off that list, but also weren't indexed.

If I check them on the URL inspector, it now says "URL is unknown to Google". All the pages have links to them from the homepage (which is correctly indexed), and they're mentioned in the sitemap, which says it successfully discovered 21 pages. Despite that, it says "no referring sitemap detected".

I don't know if it's relevant, but the "See page indexing" button on the sitemap is greyed out. Additionally, these pages have been up for about 4 months now, having only had this activity now, 2 weeks ago.

Stephen Ostermiller
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Megukaphii
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1 Answers1

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You have to cope with 2 types of delay:

  1. If you request validation of a certain fix, this is not happening immediately. How long this takes, Google does not say precisely. But if the page disappears from the list, this has probably happened already.

  2. There is also a delay in the display in the Google search console. I have observed e.g. that I check on day X and something is not listed yet. When I check on day X+1 it is listed as if it had happened on day X-3 (just an example).

In your case you can also manually request indexing of your URL inside the Google search console. For this, go to URL inspection, put your URL there, it will display the current status for you and there is also the option to "request indexing"

Stephen Ostermiller
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Peter206
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  • It just seems a bit odd to me that it hasn't updated Google Search Console after, like, a whole week of it having been removed from "Discovered - currently not indexed"? Is that sort of timespan within your expectations? – Megukaphii Feb 08 '23 at 00:21
  • Possibly the page is queued for being checked if it will be indexed. My experience how long that takes is limited to just a few pages. But I think 1 week is still in the normal range for that. – Peter206 Feb 08 '23 at 12:27
  • @Megukaphii If you look at https://search.google.com/search-console/links does it reflect all of the links yet? The links are the easiest signal you can affect which increases speed ... the major signal you can not affect is how interested is googlebot in the topic. Google focuses on tending topics and updates those fast ... sites with non-trending topics get updated fast after they are established and have links. So there is no normal time frame. – Wayne Smith Feb 09 '23 at 20:55
  • I'm seeing the same thing @Peter206 is for a new page on a new site, about a week ... with delays when they exist adding 1 or 2 weeks. As google finds links to your content the time reduces. If it is possible to link to a new page from a site google indexes daily then that new page can get indexed in a day and pages that are linked from that page index faster. – Wayne Smith Feb 09 '23 at 21:02
  • An example of a link to a new site to index content faster would be a blue checkmark twitter account that Is not shadowed so they show up when somebody who is not log-in on twitter looks at that feed. – Wayne Smith Feb 09 '23 at 21:24
  • @Wayne It detects 0 internal links (and 1 random external link for some reason). – Megukaphii Feb 10 '23 at 22:52
  • @Megukaphii then for Google you can only wait at this point. Besides Google where can you focus energy to let people know about the site? Youtube, social media, bing, amazon, topic related sites, Linkin ... depending on only Google is putting all the eggs in one basket. When Google sees information about you elsewhere it will become more interested. – Wayne Smith Feb 11 '23 at 05:12