Most of Site’s Pages Excluded from Google Index

@talbot649

We are sorry that you are having trouble with your URLs not being indexed.

These are URLs in the sitemap that are in the queue but it’s going to take Google some time to get through them and mark them as either indexed or not. You may need to wait a couple of days to see the updated Google Search Console report. It’s possible that Google tried to crawl the URL but the site was overloaded; therefore Google had to reschedule the crawl. Just give it some time and check again later on.

Technically the robots.txt and sitemaps files has no issues. Yoast SEO has generated and outputted required meta tags on the page source and no meta tag detected preventing pages excluding from noindex.

We hope this helps! If you have further questions or concerns, let us know.

Thanks for your response. That was the approach we took for the first few weeks, but we’re nearly 3 months in now and the list of excluded URLs isn’t going down.

Hi,

Upon checking, the output from the Yoast SEO plugin is configured correctly. The URLs have the ‘index’ meta robots tag, the sitemap index is loading as expected, and there’s nothing in your robots.txt file that would indicate that it would block Google’s crawlers.

Based on the documentation from Google on the index coverage report:

Discovered – currently not indexed: The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.

If resubmitting the sitemap or requesting to fetch updated information hasn’t fixed the issue, we recommend that you reach out to the Google Search Central Help Community for further assistance as to possible reasons why certain URLs on your site aren’t being indexed.

Thanks for your time, I’ll try the Google community.