“Crawled, currently not indexed” pages - what does this status mean and how can it be fixed?

Google wants strong incoming links.

All internal causes may be corrected easily.

But strong incoming links
are difficult to obtain.

 

Strong incoming links are important, but that doesn’t make the problem of poor content go away. And it’s not always easy to fix. In fact, I would say it’s rarely something that can be fixed easily. Websites typically have a lot of content pages, and if the problems are systemic, they affect a large portion of those pages. Even editing a large percentage of a site’s pages is always a lot of work.

Strong backlinks don’t solve anything by themselves. If a site has a lot of content-related problems, those content problems need to be fixed rather than relying on strong backlinks.

 

Great breakdown perfect for newbies!

 

Worth separating this from "Discovered, currently not indexed". Crawled means Google fetched the page and decided it wasn't worth keeping, so it's almost always a value or duplication call, not a technical one. What fixed it for us was merging near-duplicate pages into one stronger page with a 301, adding something the other pages don't have, and linking it from a page that already gets traffic. Hitting "Request indexing" again and again on an unchanged page rarely sticks.

 

On the translated pages: hreflang is usually the missing piece. Google sees the translation as a near-duplicate of the source article and the smaller language version loses. Add proper hreflang between versions and give each translation a localized intro paragraph. Straight machine translation with zero local adaptation is exactly what stalls.

Also worth knowing: the manual indexing request button has a daily quota per property. People burn through it requesting the same URL five times in a row.