Hi all. I posted this on the Google Search Console community as well but they haven’t been a huge help in the past so I’m hoping someone here might have ideas.
I know tons of people ask about the “Crawled - currently not indexed” issue and trust me, I’ve not only seen all the common advice but spent months and months reading up on this and trying to solve it, including reducing myself to using Gemini. Nothing’s helped and to me, something either feels off or I’m just missing some key element.
Short history: I have a hobby blog that I’ve been running since 2012. It’s had hiatuses and has been through various hosts and platforms over the year. I re-launched it using self-hosted Ghost last Summer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to SEO for much of its life and I’m sure it wasn’t being indexed properly for a long time and has a poor reputation with Google as a result.
Initially, there were a couple of elements of my Ghost configuration that could have been preventing proper crawling so I’ve corrected those. I can see in GSC that the site is being regularly crawled (though it doesn’t seem to have been for over a week now for some reason) but Google keeps refusing to index the pages.
To avoid making this post too long, here are my observations that are confusing me:
- I’ve added my sitemaps and RSS feed but it never reads them again after initially adding them.
- I’ve verified through the Screenshots of the Live Test that pages are rendering in Googlebot properly.
- The only thing Google has indexed it the site’s home page.
- I have the posts set to show recent and featured posts in the side bar, creating internal linkbacks.
- I do put new posts on LinkedIn and Bluesky, my Discord and I’m also in a handful of blog roll indexes. I don’t use much social media and try to link my posts elsewhere when I can and they’re relevant but as many know, most communities get upset at self-promotion, even when it’s the only kind of promotion you have.
- Every time I look up a URL in GSC, it says there is no referring sitemap and no referring page, both of which are not true. It also shows N/A for all the crawled stats, even if I’ve manually had it do so multiple times or if it shows up in the Crawl Stats report.
- Every URL read attempt in the Crawl Stats report shows an OK status.
- I’ve tried “Validate Fix” three times now. Every time, it sits processing for months and nothing changes when it completes.
- I have been waiting literally 6+ months since I corrected every issue I was told about and despite seeing constant crawling, nothing is being indexed beyond the home page.
And before anyone makes the quality argument, I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that. My posts are in adherence to all of Google’s guidelines, they are 100% human written, link to relevant content and with all the linkfarm slop I see at the top of most search results now, I just don’t accept that my posts aren’t good enough. They’re not going to win a Pulitzer but are easily on par with stuff that is getting indexed. Multiple other search engines also have no issue with them. I’ve also talked to a couple of SEO professionals on LinkedIn who offered to take a free look at things for me and both of them said they don’t understand why this is happening.
What’s frustrating here is that GSC just appears to have such bad mojo towards my site that it refuses to update sitemaps after they’re added and straight up lies to me about the stats for crawls. Its own logs show that it is checking the site but is just ignoring everything it finds and not telling me the truth about what it’s doing. This feels to me almost like something’s bugged as opposed to a real issue but since there is basically no support for this, I can’t even confirm if that’s a real issue.
Surely after fixing the issues months ago and with months of successful crawling, GSC knows the site is reliable now, right? If not, does anyone know how long it can be stuck in limbo like this before it finally gets trusted again? And what about the stats that are incorrect? I have several larger posts that I’ve held off publishing because I don’t want to put in all that effort just to be lost in search engine limbo but at this point, it looks like it could be stuck here indefinitely.
This is a hobby blog that I don’t monetize and which costs me money to run. I’m not looking to turn it into a career, I just want people to be able to find what I say so those interested can read it and discuss it. But I’m out of ideas now and even Google’s own AI is telling me “You’ve done everything right, just keep waiting.”
I’m really hoping someone might have some insight here because I’m rather demoralized at this point and feel like I’ve tried everything.
Thanks.