Today, 21 August 2024, Search Engine Land published the following article by SEO Anna Crowe:

How to fix ‘Crawled – Currently not indexed’ error in Google Search Console

As the article title indicates, it discusses strategies for reducing the instances of this issue. One of those strategies is to use self-referencing canonical tags to combat duplicate content. So, I decided to take a look at a the GPWA.org site and the GPWAtimes.org page using Google Search Console, and this is what I found:

GPWA.org: 0 pages “Crawled – currently not indexed”, which is 0% of the 69K pages indexed.
GPWAtimes.org: 2,212 pages “Crawled – currently not indexed”, which is 61.2% of the 3.59K pages indexed.

And I also took a look at the result of a screaming frog crawl of those sites to see how we were doing in terms of having self-referencing canonical tags on the two sites. This is what I found:

GPWA.org: 122,240 web pages, 103,607 (84.8%) with self-referencing canonical tags.
GPWAtimes.org: 5,93 web pages, 1,628 (27.4%) with self-referencing canonical tags.

For this week’s poll I ask whether you use self-referencing canonical tags on your website, and the extent to which you do so.

Besides voting the poll, I invite you to share your thoughts about using self-referencing canonical tags, about pages on your site that are crawled but not indexed, and about what Google Search Console reports for pages that are crawled but currently not indexed on your sites.

Personally, my goal is to have canonical tags on 100% of the web pages of all of the sites I am associated with. But sometimes that can be challenging, especially when third-party software is involved. For example, on the GPWA website 13,733 of the web pages 15,379 without canonical tags are created by the forum software. And, on the GPWA Times website, 100% of the 4,363 web pages without canonical tags are created by the software that creates flipping books out of magazine issues. By contrast, the Casino City Times website we operate, which does not use any third-party software, currently has 137,757 pages and every single one of those pages contains a self-referencing canonical tag.

Michael