23 September 2026 · 7 min read · Oscar Markham
Why Google is not indexing your pages
You publish twenty pages, submit a sitemap, and three weeks later Search Console says five are indexed. This is one of the most common and least understood problems in small business SEO, and the fix depends entirely on which of several quite different things is happening.
Read the status before doing anything
Search Console's Pages report groups your URLs by reason. 'Discovered — currently not indexed' means Google knows the page exists and has not bothered to fetch it. 'Crawled — currently not indexed' means it fetched it and chose not to include it. Those are opposite problems.
The first is a crawl budget and authority problem. The second is a quality judgement. Treating one as the other wastes months.
Discovered but not crawled
This is normal on a new or low-authority site, and it means Google is rationing attention. It has a queue and you are not near the top of it.
What helps: submitting an accurate sitemap, having real links from other sites, and internal links from pages Google already visits often. What does not help: publishing more pages, which lengthens the queue.
Crawled but not indexed
Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth including. Usually that means it is too similar to other pages on your site, too thin, or duplicates something that exists elsewhere.
The classic cause in small business sites is a set of location pages that are the same page with the town name swapped. Google treats the set as low value and indexes one or none.
- Discovered, not crawled — authority and crawl budget problem
- Crawled, not indexed — quality or duplication problem
- Duplicate without canonical — you have two URLs for one page
- Excluded by noindex — usually intentional, sometimes left on by accident
- Soft 404 — the page returns 200 but looks empty to Google
- Blocked by robots.txt — rare, and usually a developer mistake
The lastmod trap
Many sites stamp the current date on every URL in the sitemap on every deploy. Google uses that field to decide what to re-crawl, and when a site claims all 200 pages changed every day, Google stops believing the signal entirely.
Accurate lastmod dates — the date the page genuinely changed — are worth more than any submission frequency.
What actually speeds it up
Links from sites Google already crawls often. That is the honest answer and it is the one nobody wants, because it is slower and harder than publishing more content.
A single link from a real local business directory, a supplier, a trade association or a local news site does more for indexing than twenty new pages.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.