<b>Reading "Discovered – not indexed"</b>

<b>Reading "Discovered – not indexed"</b>

This status is not a sitemap bug — it's a crawl-budget or quality signal. Submitting harder won't fix it.

Triage SOP:
Step 1 — Confirm the URL is reachable (200, not soft-404, not blocked).
Step 2 — If the count is rising weekly, Google is finding URLs faster than it values them.
Step 3 — Check whether these are thin/near-duplicate pages mass-generated from a template.

Pass/fail:
— ✅ "Discovered – not indexed" stays flat or shrinks month over month.
— ❌ Growing every week → you're flooding the sitemap with low-value URLs.

Fix path, in order: remove thin URLs from the sitemap → improve internal links to the survivors → only then resubmit.

Definition of done: the bucket is stable, and every URL still in the sitemap earns its slot.