Google Search Console Said My Pages Weren't Indexed: What Each Message Meant

A few weeks after launching my portfolio, I opened Google Search Console and found a section called "Why pages aren't indexed". It listed two of my pages. I assumed something was broken. It wasn't quite that simple. Here is what each message meant and what I did.

First: indexed vs. not indexed

A page that is indexed can appear in Google results. A page that is not indexed cannot. Search Console tells you the reason, and the reasons are very different from each other.

Message 1: "Alternate page with proper canonical tag"

This means Google found the page, but your page told Google that another URL is the main version. So Google indexed the other URL and left this one out.

This is often normal. It happens with:

• http vs https
• www vs no www
• A trailing slash vs none
• A mobile version of a URL

But it can also be a bug. Mine was.

How I checked

I pasted the URL into the URL Inspection bar at the top and looked at two lines:

User-declared canonical:   https://my-site.com/
Google-selected canonical: Same as user-declared canonical

My page was /portfolio, but the canonical said /, my home page. A single canonical tag in index.html was shared by every route. Google treated my other pages as copies of the home page.

The fix

I set a different canonical for each route:

import { useEffect } from "react";

const SITE = "https://your-domain.com";

export function useCanonical(path: string) {
  useEffect(() => {
    let link = document.querySelector<HTMLLinkElement>('link[rel="canonical"]');
    if (!link) {
      link = document.createElement("link");
      link.rel = "canonical";
      document.head.appendChild(link);
    }
    link.href = `${SITE}${path}`;
  }, [path]);
}

If the "Google-selected canonical" is the URL you actually want, you can leave it alone. If it points to the wrong page, fix your tag.

Message 2: "Discovered - currently not indexed"

This means Google knows the URL exists, maybe from your sitemap, but has not crawled it yet. It is very common on new sites. It is not an error.

What helped me think about it:

• Is the URL in my sitemap.xml, with my real domain?
• Do other pages link to it? A page with no links pointing to it gets low priority.
• Does it have real content, a unique title and a clear description?

What I did not do

I pressed Request indexing several times on the same page. It did not speed anything up. Google decides when to crawl, and repeated requests do not help. Request indexing once after you fix something, then wait.

A simple checklist

1. Open Pages in Search Console and click each reason to see the affected URLs
2. Paste one URL into URL Inspection
3. Compare the user-declared and Google-selected canonical
4. Check that the URL is in your sitemap and linked from other pages
5. Click Test live URL, then Request indexing once
6. Wait. It can take days to weeks

What I'm tracking

I don't have ranking results to show, and I won't claim any. I'm watching whether those pages move to Indexed in the Pages report.

Wrapping up

Search Console messages sound scary, but most of them are information. Read the exact reason first, and then decide whether anything is wrong.

You can see my portfolio here: ritika-rajput-portfolio.vercel.app. I also share videos on RitikaMoments.

Which Search Console message confused you the most?