Of every message Search Console has given me this year, "Crawled, currently not indexed" is the only one that stings. The others are administrative. This one is a verdict, and it took me a while to be willing to read it properly. Here is the distinction that finally made it click. There are four reasons a page of mine was sitting outside Google's index. Three of them are about whether Google can get in. One of them is about whether Google, having got in and read the page, decided it was not worth including. That last one is a judgment about my work, and I had exactly one page carrying it. This post is about that page, and about the difference between a site that is hard to enter and a page that is easy to dismiss. What the label actually means "Crawled, currently not indexed" means Google fetched the page, read it, understood it, and chose not to put it in the index. Not because it could not reach it. Because it decided the page did not add enough to what i...
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Google Search Console Says Redirect Error. Here Is What It Actually Means.
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If you are here because Search Console told you eighteen of your pages are not indexed and the reason it gave was "Redirect error", you are in the right place, and I can save you about six weeks of my life.
I ran into this on my own diary, vitaladge.site. Google flagged eighteen posts. The word redirect made me assume a plugin, a broken link, a server rule, something technical I would need help to find. It was none of those. The redirects had all been fixed weeks before. Google was simply reading a very old file card and had not looked at my site since.
Here is the whole thing, in the order it actually happened, with the numbers I wrote down.
What the message actually says
"Redirect error" in the Pages report means one narrow thing: when Google last tried to visit that URL, it was sent somewhere else, or the chain of redirects it followed did not end where Google expected. It is a statement about a past visit, not a statement about your site right now. The report even tells you when it looked, in the URL Inspection panel, next to "Last crawl". Mine said things like 14 September and 6 October.
That distinction is the entire answer, and Google does not make it obvious. The report is a log of what the crawler met on a particular day. If you have changed your site since then, the log is still true about that day and completely wrong about today.
My own Pages report on 6 November 2026. Note the snapshot date in the top corner, 23 October, which is older than most of the fixes I made.
Why I had eighteen of them
Until 21 October my site had a problem I could not see from my own laptop, and I have written about how one July click started it. Visitors on a phone were being served a 404 while the desktop version loaded perfectly. Every check I ran, ran on desktop, so everything looked fine to me. Google checks with a mobile crawler first, which means for roughly three months the address Google was testing did not serve a page at all.
During the same period my site was answering under more than one address. Plain http answered, then redirected. The version without www answered, then redirected. A version with a trailing slash after the .html answered, then redirected. To a human those are obviously the same article. To a crawler they are three doors and a note claiming they are one door, and when the final destination occasionally failed, what it wrote down was redirect error.
Once I fixed the underlying fault, every one of those addresses settled down. All of them now resolve in a single hop. Nothing on the site redirects more than once, and nothing ends anywhere except the canonical www address.
How to check yours in two minutes
You do not need a tool or a plugin. Take one URL that Google flagged and test the four versions of it: with www, without www, over http, and with a trailing slash.
If any of them takes more than one hop to reach the final page, you have found your problem. One hop is normal and harmless. Two or three hops, or a hop that lands on an error page, is what produces this label.
Then look at your sitemap and confirm that every URL in it uses the exact same host as your canonical tag. Mine has 62 entries today and every single one is on the www address. If your sitemap advertises a host that immediately redirects, you have handed Google a map that disagrees with your own site, and it will spend its limited visits deciding which version is the real one instead of reading your content.
Last check: run a status check across every URL in your sitemap, not a sample. Mine came back 61 out of 61 with a clean 200, which is how I knew the label was historical rather than current.
The part that confuses everybody: validation
Search Console lets you press "Validate fix". I pressed it. It said Started. Ten days later it had processed zero URLs. That is not a queue moving slowly. A validation that has read nothing in ten days is a job that has stopped, and the interface will not tell you that, because the word Started looks like progress.
What worked was pressing Validate fix again, then resubmitting the sitemap so Google had a fresh timestamp to work from, then requesting indexing on individual URLs so there was a reason to fetch them. Within a day the sitemap showed a new last-read date and 62 discovered pages, up from 61.
If you take one thing from this post: do not wait for a validation that has shown no movement for a week. Press it again.
Redirect error is not the only label, and the others mean different things
My report had four reasons listed, and they are worth telling apart because the fix for each is different.
Redirect error, eighteen pages. Historical, as above. Nothing to fix if the site is now clean, it just needs a fresh visit.
Discovered, currently not indexed, thirty-six pages. This is the one nobody explains properly. It means Google knows the address exists, from your sitemap or a link, and has decided not to spend a visit yet. Nothing is broken. This is crawl budget, and the cause is usually that the site is young, has few links pointing at it, and has not earned trust yet. Mine spent months here because the site had two weeks of working history and one external domain linking in.
Crawled, currently not indexed, one page. Google visited, read the page, and chose not to include it. That is a judgment about quality, duplication or thinness, and it is the only one of these labels that is genuinely about your content.
Alternative page with proper canonical tag, one page. Usually harmless. It means Google treats two URLs as the same page, which is the correct behaviour when the tag is right.
What I did, in the order I would do it again
First, fix the site before touching Search Console. Crawl your own pages the way a crawler does, on a phone user agent, and confirm they load. Everything else is wasted effort until that is true.
Second, make every address resolve in one hop, and make the sitemap agree with the canonical tag.
Third, press Validate fix and watch it for three days. If it does not move, press it again and resubmit the sitemap.
Fourth, request indexing on individual URLs, oldest first, about twelve a day, which is the limit. Oldest first because those are the pages already carrying the bad history.
Fifth, stop reading the summary numbers as if they were live. My Pages report still reads seven indexed, from a snapshot dated 23 October, while a live search shows twelve posts plus two other pages. Both numbers were true on different days, and neither was true today.
Crawl budget, in plain language
There is no setting for this and no button to press, which is why it drives people mad. Google has a limited number of visits it is willing to spend on your site, and it decides how many based partly on how much it trusts you. A site that has answered reliably for two years gets more visits in a week than a site that has answered for two weeks gets in two months.
My site had a bad record and then a clean one. That is the worst starting position, because the crawler's memory of the bad period is newer than its memory of the clean one. Thirty-six pages sat in discovered, not indexed, which is Google saying: I know about these, and I am not spending a visit on them yet.
The things that actually move crawl budget are dull and slow. Links from other sites, especially ones that get crawled often themselves. Internal links from pages Google has already indexed to pages it has not, because that is how a crawler finds a new page while it is already reading something. A sitemap that it can read without errors. And time, spent being reachable.
What does not move it: publishing volume, keyword stuffing, begging in a forum, or adding more URLs to the same sitemap. I tried two of those and got a bigger pile, not a shorter queue.
What my own report said, so you can compare yours
Pulled on 6 November, from the Pages report for vitaladge.site, with the snapshot dated 23 October:
Not indexed, 56 pages, split into four reasons. Redirect error, 18 pages, source: website, validation started. Discovered, currently not indexed, 36 pages, source: Google systems. Crawled, currently not indexed, 1 page, source: Google systems. Alternative page with proper canonical tag, 1 page.
Indexed, 7 pages. Meanwhile a live search on the same morning returned 14 URLs: 12 posts, the homepage and the About page. So the report undercounted by five and the reason count was mostly historical. Two numbers, same site, same day, both defensible and neither current.
That is why the first thing I do every morning now is a plain search, not a dashboard. It takes nine minutes and it cannot be stale.
The checklist I now run on a site like this
One. Load three posts and the homepage on a mobile user agent, not your laptop. Confirm they return a page, not an error.
Two. Test www against non-www and http against https on a single URL. Count the hops. One is fine.
Three. Pull the sitemap and confirm every entry sits on the canonical host, and that none of them return a redirect.
Four. Compare the sitemap count to the number of posts you have published. Mine said 61 when I had 61 posts, which sounds obvious until the day it says 55 and you cannot name the missing six.
Five. Search your own domain and write down the count. That is your real number, and it is the one you will report to yourself next week.
Six. Only then open Search Console, and read the reason column as history rather than verdict.
After the fix, nothing happens immediately
This is the part that made me doubt the fix was real. I made the site clean on 21 October. The next day the report looked identical. A week later it still looked identical, because the snapshot had not refreshed. The only thing that changed quickly was the sitemap date, and that is a small, unglamorous win you have to be willing to count.
What I expect, honestly, is weeks rather than days. A young domain with a short clean history does not get instant reconsideration. The realistic goal is steady movement: a few pages indexed a week, the redirect errors clearing as their history ages out, and the discovered pile shrinking because the crawler finds a reason to come back.
So I keep two numbers now. The live count, which tells me where I am. And the number of pages I requested this week, which is the only one I control.
What not to do
Do not resubmit to AdSense while this is unresolved. A reviewer landing on a site the crawler cannot reach produces the same rejection you already have, and mine went four rounds of that without ever being told which rule failed.
Do not publish more posts to fix an indexing problem. I did this for weeks. Sixty-one posts later, twelve were in the index, because adding pages to a site nobody can crawl just makes a bigger pile.
Do not assume the label names the cause. Redirect error did not name a redirect. It named a visit that happened before the fix, and learning to read the report that way is worth more than any plugin.
The short version
Redirect error means Google's last visit to that URL ended somewhere it did not expect. If your addresses are clean now, the label is a fossil. Check the three or four variants of one URL, confirm single hops and a clean 200 across your sitemap, then press Validate fix, resubmit the sitemap, and request indexing on the oldest pages first while you publish something worth crawling in the meantime.
It took me six weeks and a lot of misplaced guilt about my writing to learn that. The writing was fine. The door was jammed.
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