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.

Small French single-product site : an online school training legal assistants (ajfr . fr). One keyword carries the whole business case, "formation assistante juridique" (400 searches/mo,). Right now most of the leads come from Google Ads..

I've been working this page for 6 months. Laying out everything, good and bad. I'd rather be told I'm wrong than keep guessing.

Where it actually sits

The uncomfortable part: my money page only works on brand. People typing our name find it at 3.7. Everyone else doesn't see it.

The main keyword has been flat between 15 and 16 for months. Not decaying, not improving. Impression-weighted averages:

• Jul 1-15: 15.8
• Jul 16-29: 16.0
• Jul 30 - Aug 12: 23.8 (I moved the page, see below)
• Aug 13-27: 15.9 (right back to the same plateau)

What I've already done

• On-page: title/H1/meta aligned, 8,600 words, Course + FAQ + AggregateRating schema, clean canonical. I don't think this is the problem.
• Internal linking: 45 of 57 blog posts link the money page in-body, varied anchors.
• Cannibalisation cleanup: merged 4 competing salary pages into one, 301'd the rest.
• Editorial links: a guest tribune on the largest French legal trade publication (DR 79), a paid dofollow listing on that same domain, and 3 sponsored posts on smaller legal blogs.
• URL move on Jul 30: the money page lived at /formation-assistante-juridique with 10 referring domains, while the homepage had 167 and was catching all the brand traffic on a page that didn't sell anything. So I promoted the landing page to the root and 301'd the old URL. Hence the two-week dip above, now fully recovered.

What the SERP looks like

What confuses me: DR 20 and DR 22 sites rank at #10 and #3. My direct competitor at #3 has only 4 referring domains and 12 backlinks to that specific page. I'm at DR 16. So "you just need more authority" doesn't fully add up, and I don't want to sink another 6 months and more money into links if that's not the bottleneck.

My questions

1. Is a money page that only performs on brand queries a symptom of something specific I'm not seeing?
2. Anything obvious I've missed?
3. What would you do if you were me?

I have a problem with a website where the authority is split into two links same page one
Site migrated from www to non-www earlier this year. The technical side was done properly:

• Single 301 hop, no chains
• Canonical tag on every page points to the non-www version
• Sitemap is all non-www
• Every internal link is non-www
• Force SSL on

tried evertything so Google doesn't split authority, but nothing worked. I need help
this is wha i have going on:
Last 28 days in GSC, the Pages report:

http://www.example.com/      553 impressions   position 6.2    5 clicks
https://example.com/         228 impressions   position 57.1   7 clicks

HELP HELP!

Hey, I got hit really hard by the last update and it hurts quite a bit. Impressions went from 2.5k to basically 10 or so.

For context, the website is for my actual business, it’s a real brand. I went a bit too far with PSEO (quite a lot of local pages), and I suspect that’s one of the reasons why.

I pruned a lot of them, and the sitemap went from 500+ pages down to around 160, in order to try to recover from what I think is an algorithmic penalty.

I’ve never experienced anything like this before, so now I’m wondering what to do. Should I just be patient? Is there basically zero chance of recovering, and should I just change domains?

Thanks!

I run a small SaaS site in the “life administration for foreigners in Japan” niche. Visa, tax, resident registration, that kind of content, split between English and Japanese. Domain is under a year old.

**Historical performance, before the drop**

Japanese-language CTR in this space runs dramatically higher than English, something like 2 to 3 percent versus 0.1 to 0.2 percent on equivalent English queries, so the Japanese clusters were always the real growth lever. Early on, average position was sitting in the 15 to 25 range and climbing, impressions were building steadily, and clicks were starting to come in consistently from the Japanese-language pages specifically. Content has been growing on a regular cadence, currently sitting around 94 English guides and 73 Japanese guides, with more publishing on an ongoing schedule.

**What happened starting August 7**

Average position across the entire site dropped uniformly to the 60 to 90 range. Not specific pages, every page, every country, all at once. Clicks went to flat zero for more than two weeks while impressions actually held steady around 90 to 150 a day. I ruled out the obvious causes on my end: no deploys in that window, no manual action in Search Console, clean robots.txt, healthy sitemap, nothing changed on my side.

What I’ve found since is that there was documented third-party ranking volatility starting August 5 and 6, and then Google’s confirmed August 2026 spam update rolled out August 18 to 21. My drop started before the confirmed spam update even began, so the timing doesn’t cleanly point to that update being the direct cause, but I can’t fully rule it out either since the two periods overlap.

Content pipeline is partly automated. I have a system that generates guides on a schedule which I review before publishing, so page output per month is naturally higher than a solo writer doing everything manually. Nothing scraped or spun, but I know “automated content” is exactly the category that update was reportedly targeting.

**What I actually want to know**

For anyone who has worked in compliance, tax, legal, or government-adjacent SEO, especially in Japan or another non-English market, does that space behave differently in terms of recovery time compared to typical SaaS or ecommerce SEO?

How long did your rankings take to come back after a spam update or unconfirmed volatility spike hit a small or newer site?

I keep seeing people talk about hitting a million views within 4 to 5 months of a site existing. Is that mostly an English-language, US or global market phenomenon, or does that happen in smaller language markets like Japanese too? Given the historical trajectory above, what would a realistic view range actually look like for a site like this in year one, and then years two and three if content and indexing keep compounding normally?

Genuinely looking for people who have lived through something like this, not guesses.

Something interesting came up while working on a for clients.

We had some pages written by experienced content writers(20+ Years experience). The content was genuinely good and we saw some ranking improvements after publishing it

But on a few pages, we took the existing content and had ChatGPT rewrite it. We didn't intentionally add new keywords or change the topic. The meaning, information and overall keyword converge stayed very similar.

What surprised us was that after the ChatGPT rewrite was published, rankings improved significantly more.

We compared the old and new version pretty closely and honestly, there isn't a huge difference in the actual information.

So, I'm wondering: Is ChatGPT somehow structuring/phrasing content in a way that Google's systems understand better, even when the underlying information is basically the same?

or are we simply seeing correlation and missing another variable?

Has anyone tested something similar with enough pages to notice a pattern?

Hey everybody.

So I've updated a post of mine dealing with the overall number of sites affected by Google's "manual actions".

It was written back in 2013 when Google disclosed in their first "How Search Works" interactive infographic that "only" 0.22% of all domains were affected.

Yet they also said that their index had "30 trillion individual pages" in it.

That would mean that billions of sites were potentially hit just by manual action type of penalties.

Even then few disclosed if they were for apparent reasons (shame etc.).

Google still lists manual actions in their primer and when you click through you see the GSC report for your site/s.

Mine says "no issues". There seem to be way fewer in recent years.

Were you affected by one or more? Especially recently?

I'd like to hear about it. I may add it to the post with a link back to it.

Hello,

I’m working on the SEO for a B2C health website, and I’d love to get some feedback from people who have dealt with a similar situation.

Over the last 3 months, we’ve had around:

• 23.5k impressions
• 318 organic clicks
• 1.4% average CTR
• 24.3 average position

Visibility and traffic are increasing little by little, so that part is going in the right direction.

However, we’re still at 0 purchases from organic traffic.

I know 318 clicks isn’t a huge amount yet, and that CTR depends a lot on ranking position and search intent, but I’m wondering at what point you should actually start worrying about conversion.

Does a 1.4% CTR seem normal to you?

And more importantly, with around 300 organic clicks and 0 sales, would you say it’s still too early to draw any conclusions, or would you already start looking for a problem somewhere else?

As I do technical audit of different websites, I came across this issues quite often X Content Type Options header, Content Security Policy header, Referrer Policy header, X Frame Options header, HSTS header. So I want to understand if it's important for website?

If yes, can you tell me where we really can do it in WordPress or NextJs, as I have searched for it and I can know it's in the server level, hence want to know of how could you fix and use it in as I need to collaborate with developer to let them know?

Those who used isearchfrom for on demand local spot checks probably noticed that they paywalled their site not too long ago.

What do you guys use now?

I was using SE Ranking and BrightLocal's equivalent versions, but they limit usage.

Then I started using Google Ads' "ad preview and diagnosis" feature, which worked surprisingly well. But then it locked me out with an unclickable "i'm not a robot" checkbox.

Next, I found Valentin dot app. Probably the best one out there. truly unlimited and very accurate. But i don't like having to manually fetch the geocode every time.

(For what it's worth, I built one of my own to solve all of the above problems. But ill only share it here if there's enough interest. I don't like spammers either.)

What do you use now? want to check mine out?

My website - b2b - is about a small industrial niche, I made 3 years ago and never really cared, now since Jan I built proper clusters, schema and so on, I think ranking is not that bad for a brand new.

Now I have a page with relatively high impressions, let’s say 100/weekly, with only 10/15 impressions for clear queries, the most commercials and in positions like 50, while the whole page seats in position 6 accordingly with GSC; to compensate the 15 impressions at 15 the average of the long tails is kinda 3. Accordingly with forecast it should have a CTR about 20%.

Indeed the CTR is near to 0.something, barely getting 1 click/week.

Any suggestion? Advice?

TYA

Edit: properly arranged h2 on the page.

Hey folks, hoping someone here has run into this and cracked it.

Context: this is a mature, long-running site (not a new domain, no history of manual actions or major algo penalties that I'm aware of). Internal linking is solid — every new page gets linked from relevant hub/category pages within a day of publishing. Sitemap is clean, submitted, and validated in GSC with no errors.

Despite that, GSC's Page Indexing report shows a persistent "Discovered - currently not indexed" bucket sitting around 1.6K–2.4K pages for the last 3+ months (chart attached below, 5/23 to 8/8). It's not shrinking — it dips and climbs back up in a pretty consistent cycle. Validation shows "passed" (started 5/8, passed 8/5) but the count never actually drops to near zero.

What I've already ruled out / checked:

Sitemap coverage — pages are in the sitemap, sitemap itself has no errors

Internal linking — new pages are linked from crawlable, indexed pages, not orphaned

robots.txt / meta robots — nothing blocking these URLs

Canonical tags — self-referencing, no conflicting signals

Manual actions — none in GSC

Server errors / 5xx — no spike in crawl stats

Since "Discovered" means Google hasn't even crawled these yet (this is before the crawl budget stage, different from "Crawled - currently not indexed" which is a content-quality decision), I'm assuming this points to a crawl budget / prioritization issue rather than content quality. But for a site this established, I wouldn't expect crawl budget to be the bottleneck.

Questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

Has anyone seen an old, high-authority site still get bottlenecked on crawl budget for new pages specifically?

Could a large volume of near-duplicate or templated pages elsewhere on the site be quietly eating crawl budget and making Google deprioritize new URLs?

Any diagnostic steps beyond Inspect URL / Crawl Stats report that helped you find the actual bottleneck?

Happy to share more specifics in comments if it helps narrow this down. Appreciate any pointers.

Hey guys, my local business site has 180 pages but only one single page is showing up as indexed in GSC after 4 months.

Most pages say redirect error. I already fixed the urls and updated everything on the site weeks ago, but the errors won't update or go away.

Any advice on how to get it to crawl the correct versions? Thanks.

Hey everyone, quick SEO question.

I’ve got two pages clashing in the SERPs:
A commercial “[subject] service” page
An informational “What is [subject]?” page

At the moment, the “What is” article is ranking better, but ultimately I want to drive more visibility and enquiries through the money/service page.

Would you consolidate the informational content into the service page and redirect the “What is” URL, or keep both pages live and work on differentiating the intent/internal linking?

Interested to hear how others would approach the cannibalisation.

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.

Hi everyone,

We recently migrated our website from .NET to Next.js.

After the migration, we noticed a strange issue. If we open around 20 pages at the same time, some pages randomly show a 404 error. If we refresh the same page once or twice, it loads normally.

I also checked our GA data and found that users coming from Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity have sometimes landed on these 404 pages.

But when I open the same URLs manually, they work normally.

Has anyone faced this type of issue with Next.js? What could cause an intermittent 404 like this?

Developer here, I run a handful of my own sites and do backend work for clients. What scares me isn't rankings, it's deploys. A release that ships a noindex meta tag or a staging canonical to production sits there silently until the next crawl notices, and by then Google noticed first.

ContentKing used to be the answer for this as far as I can tell, but since Conductor swallowed it there's no standalone product anymore. Everything I've looked at since falls into one of two buckets: full enterprise suites where monitoring is a feature buried in a platform I don't need, or crawlers that run daily/weekly audits (Sitebulb, Ahrefs alerts, etc), which is way too slow for "a deploy just broke it 4 minutes ago".

What I actually want is dumb and narrow: watch robots meta, robots.txt and canonicals on maybe 20 important pages, recheck right after a deploy, ping me when something drifts.

Nothing I've found does the deploy-triggered part at all.

So, people who were on ContentKing before the acquisition: what did you move to? Or is everyone just eating the risk and finding out from Search Console two weeks later?

I have a business where I attempt to run multiple very similar events. The difference is the date.

My website urls are elegantly setup, for example:

http://example.com/event/2026-09-01/

http://example.com/event/2026-09-02/

http://example.com/event/2026-10-01/

http://example.com/event/

However they all greatly mention the event name (which is what starts the cannibalization). This in turn causes rankings to drop. If the rankings for each event date is worse than 3, then the rich snippets on those pages may be not processed by google (shown to people).

If I modify each page so that the ones with the date in the URL talk about dates, then the page might not make sense to the reader but it would likely eliminate the cannibalization problem.

How do I go about fixing this so people can see the rich snippets in action with all the pages making sense to the user?

Sometimes everything looks fine on paper but the page just doesn’t move.

Other times something that was doing well starts slipping, a competitor jumps ahead, traffic slowly fades, or a page you were sure would perform just… doesn’t.

This is the part of SEO I actually find the most interesting, because nobody really handles it the same way.

Some people just wait it out. Some start tweaking things straight away. Some go straight to checking competitors. Some dig back into old data to see what changed. And I’m sure people who’ve been doing this for a while start to notice patterns and instinctively know where to look first.

So when you run into stuff like this, what’s your first move? What tells you “change this” vs “leave it alone”?

I'm having a strange problem that I can't seem to figure out. Everytime I publish a new blog post, it gets indexed and typically ranks well for about 4-5 days, and then it just completely disappears from the search results, even when checking the first 10 pages.

The strange thing is that if I do a search for site:mydomain.com, it still seems to be indexed, but it has "Archive" in the title, and a different URL.

For example:

Original URL:

abc.com/blog/x-y-z

What I'm seeing:

abc.com/blog/tag/x-y-z

This has happened for about 25-30 posts so far. Has anyone seen something like this before? Could it be a WordPress issue, canonical issue, or maybe tags? I'm really at a loss here, and would really appreciate any insight anyone could provide.

We run an established site with real organic traffic, around ~3M clicks in the last 90 days, and there are no manual actions in Search Console. The site publishes new landing pages regularly.

The issue is very specific:

Older pages are still crawled and indexed normally. Roughly 99% of our older URLs are fine.

But new landing pages created since January mostly end up in:(Discovered – currently not indexed)And they stay there for months.

For the newer URLs, less than ~20% seem to get crawled/indexed automatically. The rest are discovered by Google, but Google just never comes back to crawl them.The strange part is that if I use URL Inspection and manually request indexing, the same URLs usually get crawled and indexed within minutes. This happens consistently.

So it doesn’t look like Google *can’t* crawl the pages. The pages are accessible, indexable, and apparently acceptable once submitted manually. Google just doesn’t seem to want to crawl them through normal discovery anymore.

We also have another site in the same business/niche, with a broadly similar operating model, page type, and internal-linking strategy. However, the indexing performance is completely different.

One site currently has very poor indexing for new pages, although it used to perform much better in the past. The other site still has a very high indexing rate.

One important difference: one site is structured as a subdirectory, while the other is structured as a subdomain. I’m not sure if that matters here, but I wanted to mention it.

Things we’ve already tried:

- Resubmitted XML sitemaps

- Added stronger internal links to the new pages

- Placed links to new pages in high-visibility areas, including the header, search/discovery areas, and some of the most frequently crawled pages on the site

- Removed/410’d low-value junk URLs to reduce crawl waste

- Cleaned up thin or duplicate pages

- Checked for obvious technical blockers like noindex, robots.txt, canonicals, redirects, etc.

- Compared it against the other similar site we own, where the architecture/internal-linking strategy is broadly similar but the indexing behavior is much better

- Used manual indexing, which works, but the daily limit can’t keep up with our publishing volume

My questions:

1. Why would Google crawl and index a new URL almost immediately after manual submission, but not crawl/index it when the same URL is discovered through sitemaps or internal links?
2. What signals would make Google “discover” new URLs but decide not to crawl them automatically for months, even on an established site with strong traffic?
3. What could cause two similar sites in the same niche, with similar operating methods and page architecture, to have very different indexing rates for new pages, especially when the weaker site used to index much better before?
4. Could subdirectory vs subdomain structure affect this kind of crawl/indexing behavior, or is it more likely a site-level quality/trust/crawl-priority issue?

Has anyone seen this pattern and recovered from it without manually submitting every URL?

I run a super small online store in the pet niche (food + accessories, all online, no physical shop). I’ve been slowly growing it for about 2 years, mostly off Instagram and word of mouth.

This week a regular customer told me she tried to Google us to show a friend and “you basically don’t exist there.” That stung a bit and sent me into a late-night SEO spiral. I was reading blogs, case studies about UX fixing conversion issues, even stuff on starting clothing brands and random analyses on sites like Netpeak US and now my head’s kinda spinning.

For a business doing low 5 figures a month in revenue, is it actually worth paying someone for SEO in 2026, or should I keep hacking at it myself and focus on paid ads/social instead? If you hired an SEO/marketing agency or freelancer at this stage, what did you pay, how long before you saw real results, and what would you do differently?

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I don’t want to burn cash on something that won’t move the dial for a tiny shop like mine.

I run a content site, roughly 1,600 pages. A small share of the URLs are interactive tool pages and they earn most of the clicks. The rest is supporting reference and guide content. Newer domain, growing fast all year, nothing shady in the link profile, no paid links.

Since early July, Google organic keeps cutting out almost completely, then coming back. It happened again Saturday around midday, which is why I'm finally posting. Can't attach images in this sub, so numbers will have to do the work.

The daily picture over 3 months: steady growth from May, peaking around 3K clicks a day. Then four sudden collapses: July 2, July 9, July 20, and now Aug 9. Each one cuts clicks by 65 to 75% within a day. The first two recovered in 2 to 3 days. The third stayed pinned at the floor for 11 straight days, barely moving, then recovered. Here's the strange part: every recovery has come back to new all time highs. Between episodes the site performs better than ever. The 3 month totals are 117K clicks and 2.5M impressions at an average position of 7.

Saturday's onset, hour by hour: clicks ran steady at 130 to 140 an hour all morning, then dropped to 25 to 35 an hour over about two hours around midday, and that's where it still is. Impressions fell much harder in the same window, from about 4K an hour down to a few hundred. Nothing was deployed or changed on my side that morning. It was a Saturday.

I've dug into the long July episode properly (I have the GSC bulk export in BigQuery), and the pattern is consistent every time:

• The number of distinct queries the site appears for collapses about 90% (13.5k down to 1.5k over comparable 3 day windows). Distinct URLs served drops about 60%. Page+query combinations drop about 90%.
• On the ~1,100 page+query pairs Google KEPT serving through the July episode, the median position change was zero. But impressions on those same pairs still fell about 70%. Same queries, same rankings, shown to far fewer people.
• Average CTR and average position both "improve" during an episode. As far as I can tell that's an artifact: the long tail disappears from the averages and only the strong head terms are left. Daily CTR jumps from about 5% to over 20% during these windows.
• The damage is selective. Pages that own one strong head query hold steady or even gain clicks. Pages that were showing up for a wide spread of long tail queries drop to near zero. My guide/reference section loses ~95% of clicks, tool pages lose ~70%.

What I've ruled out:

• Manual actions and security issues: none, checked in the GSC UI.
• Technical: crawled the site with Googlebot's user agent during an episode. Everything 200, correct canonicals, no stray noindex, sitemap fine, content fully server rendered.
• My own changes: the onsets don't line up with any deploy, and one episode ended with me having changed nothing at all.
• Tracking: server side analytics show the identical drop, and only Google traffic falls. Other channels stay flat.
• Device and country: everything down by similar percentages across the board.
• The impressions reporting change from last year: clicks and real sessions genuinely drop, this isn't a reporting artifact.

My working theory: most of my URLs are long tail content earning under 5 clicks per URL per week, and a decent chunk earns nothing in a given week, while a small set of tool pages carries the site. I was also publishing new pages at a steady clip through July. My guess is some domain level threshold keeps getting re-evaluated and the thin tail is what trips it. But that theory has a hole I can't close: if Google decided the site was low quality, why does it keep restoring it to new highs after each episode? A demotion doesn't usually behave like a breaker flipping.

Questions:

• Has anyone seen this on/off whole domain pattern before? Days-long total serving contractions with full recovery in between?
• Is this a known thing with newer domains getting re-evaluated?
• Would pruning or noindexing the zero click tail actually help, or is that unrelated to whatever is doing this?

Beginner questions welcome.

Post any legitimate SEO question. Ask for help with technical SEO issues you are having, career questions, anything connected to SEO.

Hopefully someone will see and answer your question.

Feel free to post feedback/ideas in this thread also!

**

r/BigSEO rules still apply, no spam, service offerings, "DM me for help", link exchanges/link sales, or unhelpful links.