Every Search Console index status, explained.

Two things make this report harder than it should be. The labels sound like errors when most of them are not, and several describe situations that look identical from the front but need opposite fixes. The way through is to stop reading the labels as a pass or fail grade and start reading them as literal descriptions of a decision Google made. Below they are sorted into three buckets: statuses that are usually fine, statuses that are worth investigating, and the pair where crawling and indexing get confused for each other.

Usually fine: Google working correctly

Some of the most-panicked-about statuses are the report telling you it did its job. Alternate page with proper canonical tag normally means Google found a duplicate, read the canonical you declared, and honoured it, so no action is needed beyond a two-minute check that the canonical points where you intended. Page with redirect is the same kind of thing: the URL is not indexed because it redirects and Google indexed the destination instead, which is what a redirect is for. Both only cause alarm because they sit in the not-indexed section, next to statuses that genuinely are problems.

Worth investigating: a decision you might want to change

These are the statuses where Google made a call that may not be the one you want, and where the fix depends on reading the exact wording. Discovered, currently not indexed means Google knows the URL exists and has not fetched it, a crawling and priority problem, whereas crawled, currently not indexed means it fetched the page, read it, and chose not to keep it, a judgement about the content. They look similar and their fixes have almost nothing in common, which is exactly why they are separate labels.

Duplicate without user-selected canonical means Google found duplicates, you declared no canonical, so it picked one, and its pick is often not the URL you would have chosen. And soft 404 is a mismatch between your server and your page: the header says success while the page looks empty, and Google believes the page. Each of these is a real signal worth acting on, and each has a specific fix rather than a generic one.

The crawl-versus-index confusions

The last group is where the two most-confused concepts in indexation meet. Crawling is Google fetching a page; indexing is Google deciding to store and show it, and controls for one are constantly mistaken for controls for the other. That is the whole reason robots.txt does not stop indexing: it blocks crawling, and a blocked URL can still be indexed from links pointing at it, which is what the "indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" status is telling you. The mirror image is the belief that a page needs to be formally submitted to be found at all, when in fact Google discovers pages by following links and submission is discovery help, never an indexing guarantee.

How the whole thing fits together

Most indexation problems reduce to one of two questions: has Google decided this page is not worth its attention, or have you accidentally told it not to keep the page. The first is answered by making the page more clearly worth indexing, through internal links, genuine usefulness and reducing the URL sprawl that spends your crawl budget elsewhere. The second is answered by finding the self-inflicted instruction, a stray noindex, a canonical aimed at the wrong URL, a block that should not be there. A technical audit is largely the disciplined version of walking this report top to bottom and deciding, for every status, whether it is Google being sensible or Google being told something you did not mean to say.