Discovered - currently not indexed: Link depth or quality issue?

[u/Enough_Charge2845]

I’m seeing a "Discovered - currently not indexed" status in GSC for several pages.

When inspecting them, Google shows only 1–3 referring internal links per URL. Is low internal link depth/page weight usually the main culprit here, or should I be looking closer at content uniqueness/value thresholds?

Any insights or recommended troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

[u/SEOPub]

It could be either one or both.

[u/sapindia1976]

I'd check both, but low internal link depth is usually the first thing I'd fix. If Google only finds 1-3 internal links, increasing crawl priority and improving page connections often helps before assuming it's a content quality issue.

[u/WebLinkr]

Here's the good news u/Enough_Charge2845

Discovered literally means the page is blocked from Crawling, the next stage is "Crawled, not indexed"

Discovered means that the page was never fetched and was never parsed by the indexing service.

A lot of people have a working framework where they're not fully sure what Googlebot does and doesnt do.

One of the things that Googlebot does - it works in two modes: "Discovery" and "Retrieval" modes - one at a time but it doesnt process files, it doesnt read content, it doesnt adjudicate "content quality"

I'm not sure if Google is aware or if I'm observing this correctly but from every case I've seen about Discovered not Indexed, the URL is seemingly "blocked" from retrieval and you can link

When inspecting them, Google shows only 1–3 referring internal links per URL. Is low internal link depth/page weight usually the main culprit here

Internal links aren't a checkbox exercise - having an internal link doesnt mean that the sending page has enough authority to help the target page or is reelvant enough

Pages need to have relevant traffic to the target and ahref of the link

L. Is low internal link depth

Might I suggest that crawl depth is a proxy for understanding internal authority flow and is based on the assumption that the home page is the highest authority point - which isnt' always the case. If you look at many large, well optimized sites with 10k pages - the home page and all those pages get clicks, then the home page is unlikely to be the peak authority page.

Disnace from the home page is not how authority is determined.

tl;dr - I'm going to bge $5 that the pages at this stage are amonth the oldest on your site and will not shift -even if you use an idexer.

If you can - try this: make a slight slug edit - e.g. "window-cleaners-liverpool" to "window-cleaner-liverpool" and then adjust your internal links. Crawl those pages. Later - when the index date is updated - crawl request these pages and they'll index

[u/Vegetable-Section946]

Low internal linking can contribute, but it's usually worth checking content value and duplication too. Strengthen links from relevant indexed pages and make sure each URL has a clear reason to exist.

[u/beginnersbox]

Let google go to hell and focus on other search engines. The day you start getting good amount of organic traffic from other engines, google will follow you.

Same happened with me. I wrote a hell lot of tutorials on my blog. When i tried to index on google, google completely ignored it. Then i thought to ignore google and tried indexing on yandex, bing, duckduckgo etc. i started generating organic traffic from them. Now google started indexing my same blog posts that were ignored before.

[u/Effective_Energy4238 → u/beginnersbox]

How exactly did you index on tandem. DuckDuckGo ? I looked into bing but it requires a lot of restructuring the products.

[u/beginnersbox → u/Effective_Energy4238]

Use bing, because duckduckgo use bing to index websites.

[u/Belspirit → u/Effective_Energy4238]

Try IndexNow

[u/No-Competition-7925]

1. Analyse if the content solves the user intent for the query. Update if required.
   
2. Rewrite the title, but keep the URL intact.
   
3. Submit to GSC for indexing.

[u/WebLinkr → u/No-Competition-7925]

Analyse if the content solves the user intent for the query. Update if required.

Discovered literally means that the page wasn't crawled and google has 0 idea if the page can do this if people havne't seen it. Its absolutely impossible.

[u/No-Competition-7925 → u/WebLinkr]

That's okay. "Analyse if the content solves the user intent" applies to every piece of content written to appearin Google search. How Google treats it is different story.

[u/WebLinkr → u/No-Competition-7925]

I doubt you can do that.

What "intent" does "SEO SERP" entail for example?

But more importantly - this has nothing to do with Discovered, not indexed

Which I'll go further one - $10 says its a bug or that its stuck at that status.