John Mueller of Google said on Bluesky that a large share of pages marked “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Discovered, currently not indexed” in Search Console usually signals a quality judgment about the site. Search Engine Roundtable noted that the guidance is not new.
Asked by a user whether to noindex such pages, redirect them, or wait, Mueller replied that this is “usually a sign that Google’s quality systems are unconvinced about your site.” He added that shrinking the site does not significantly raise its overall quality.
He also separated the issue from crawl budget. If only a tiny number of a site’s pages are indexed, he said, the cause is either a severe technical fault, which owners would notice at that scale, or Google simply not being convinced by the site overall.
For search teams, the practical reading is that a big unindexed pile is a content and trust audit, not a crawl configuration task. Before deleting URLs in bulk, check whether the indexed pages earn their place, because Mueller said shrinking a site does not significantly raise its quality.
Search Engine Roundtable, reporting on John Mueller’s Bluesky comments, November 11, 2026.
