Triaging "Crawled — currently not indexed" the right way

Triaging "Crawled — currently not indexed" the right way

This status panics people into crawl-budget theories. It's almost never that. Work the list:

— Export the affected URLs from the Page Indexing report.
— Spot-check 20 of them. Are they thin, duplicate, or near-identical to other pages? That's the usual cause.
— Check if they're soft-duplicates of a canonical you already have indexed.
— Confirm they're genuinely worth indexing. Half the time they're tag pages, filters, or boilerplate.
— For the ones that matter: improve content quality and internal links, then re-request.
— For the ones that don't: noindex or remove them so they stop diluting signals.

Here's the thing: "crawled, not indexed" literally means Google spent budget and chose not to index. Quality decision, not capacity.

Google crawled it. It just didn't think it was worth keeping. Fix the page, not the budget.