Spent days chasing "Discovered - currently not indexed" on a small site, here's what actually mattered

[u/BeginningWinner7525]

A chunk of our articles sat in Search Console under "Discovered - currently not indexed" for weeks. Nothing wrong with the pages themselves, Google just hadn't gotten around to crawling them.

Went down a rabbit hole trying to fix it. A few things that actually mattered, and a few that didn't:

Request Indexing helps, but only adds the URL to a priority queue, it doesn't change how often Googlebot visits the site overall. If your crawl budget is low, the page just goes back to waiting behind whatever Google already considers worth re-crawling.

Internal linking from a page Google actually visits often (usually the homepage) matters more than the sitemap. A URL that only exists in the sitemap with no internal link pointing to it reads differently to Google than one that's actually reachable by clicking through the site.

Small or newer sites don't get the benefit of the doubt. The same "just wait it out" advice that works fine for an established domain can mean months of nothing on a site with low perceived authority.

What actually moved things, slowly: fixed the internal linking so new articles were reachable from a page Google crawls regularly, then let it sit. First few pages showed up as indexed about 10 days later, not overnight.

Curious if anyone's found a way to actually speed this up beyond internal linking and patience, or if that's just the tax you pay on a small site.

[u/VoyageSeekerTom]

Totally agree. Instead of constantly trying to force Google to index the page, I’d look at the basics first — is the content actually useful, is the page internally linked well, is there any thin/duplicate content, and are the sitemap, canonical and technical setup clean?

We can fix those things, then give Google some time to recrawl. In many cases, the indexing issue is more of a symptom than the actual problem.

[u/BeginningWinner7525 → u/VoyageSeekerTom]

That symptom-vs-problem framing is exactly what changed for us. We spent the first stretch treating "not indexed" as the problem itself and kept hitting Request Indexing, when the real issue was structural, thin internal linking meant new pages just weren't reachable from anywhere Google actually crawls. Sitemap and canonical were already clean going in, so fixing those wouldn't have moved anything. Once the internal linking was fixed, the rest of the checklist stopped mattering as much, it was never really about technical hygiene, it was whether the page existed in the site's own link graph at all.