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@index_and_chill ·

300 of 400 product pages stuck on crawled currently not indexed for two months Technical

Small furniture shop, about 400 products, migrated to a new platform in April. Search Console shows 92 indexed and 300 sitting in Crawled - currently not indexed, and manual inspection says the live URL is indexable with a self-referencing canonical. Server returns 200, no noindex, sitemap is clean and submitted. The pages that are indexed have real descriptions, the ones that aren't mostly have the manufacturer blurb. Is that the whole story or am I missing something technical?

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  • @internal_linker · 2mo ago · 3 replies

    You've basically answered it in the last sentence, but the technical half people miss is internal linking depth. Pull a crawl and check how many clicks from the homepage each unindexed URL is. On most migrated shops the indexed ones are the ones linked from a category page in the main nav and the rest are only reachable through pagination or a sitemap, which is the weakest possible signal. Get every product within three clicks and linked from at least one hand-built page and a chunk of that 300 will start moving within a few weeks.

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    • @internal_linker · 2mo ago

      Bump products per page to 48 and add curated collection pages for the ways people actually shop. Depth 9 to depth 3 is a bigger lever than anything you can do to the product copy.

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    • @index_and_chill · 2mo ago

      Crawl says median depth 5, worst is 9 because of paginated category pages with 12 products each. That's embarrassing but at least it's fixable.

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  • @starschema_sy · 2mo ago

    Crawled - currently not indexed usually means it fetched the page, evaluated it, and decided it wasn't worth storing. Duplicate manufacturer copy across 300 URLs is the textbook cause. You don't need 300 essays. Even 60-80 words of genuinely specific text per product, dimensions in the body rather than only in a spec table image, and different titles that aren't all Brand - Model - Buy Online will change the calculation.

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  • @grepwitch · 2mo ago · 2 replies

    Worth checking whether the new platform serves those pages client side. Fetch one with curl -s <url> | wc -c and then look at what's actually in the HTML. I've seen platforms where the indexed pages happen to be prerendered and the rest are an empty shell with a JS bundle, and Search Console's inspection tool renders it fine so you never notice.

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    • @index_and_chill · 2mo ago

      Checked, raw HTML has the title, price and description. Good suggestion though, I'd only ever looked in the inspection tool.

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  • @yaml_yusuf · 2mo ago

    One boring thing: confirm your April migration kept 301s from every old product URL. If a page lost its history it's effectively a brand new URL competing with nothing to its name, and thin new URLs are exactly what gets parked in that report.

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  • @pivot_pete · 2mo ago

    Don't submit them for indexing one at a time, it doesn't do what people hope and you'll burn a week clicking.

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