Google Responds To Crawled, Not Indexed Errors Saying It Is Just A Delay

Remember we reported that Google is investigating the reports around SEOs noticing a spike in the Crawled, Not Indexed types of notices in the Google Search Console reports, when in fact, the pages may be indexed? Google’s response is that there are different delays in the reporting in Search Console.

In short, there were many examples of URLs in Google Search Console showing the status of “Crawled, Not Indexed” report, with recent crawl dates, that are, in fact, indexed URLs. The issue is, according to Google, that the coverage report is updated at a slower pace than the URL inspection tool. Google said “this is because the Index Coverage report data is refreshed at a different (and slower) rate than the URL Inspection.”

Google said trust the URL inspection tool more, Google wrote “the results shown in URL Inspection are more recent, and should be taken as authoritative when they conflict with the Index Coverage report.” Data shown in Index Coverage should reflect the accurate status of a page within a few days, when the status changes,” Google explained.

Here are those tweets:

This is because the Index Coverage report data is refreshed at a different (and slower) rate than the URL Inspection. The results shown in URL Inspection are more recent, and should be taken as authoritative when they conflict with the Index Coverage report. (2/4)

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 11, 2021

As always, thanks for the feedback 🙏, we’ll look for ways to decrease this discrepancy so our reports and tools are always aligned and fresh! (4/4)

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 11, 2021

Thanks to Daniel Waisberg at Google for digging into it.

Forum discussion at Twitter.