How an SEO Fixed a Weird Crawled Currently Not Indexed Issue

Google canonicalized a feed over the web page which triggered a Crawled Currently Not Indexed problem

A technical SEO published a case study of how he solved a curious Crawled Currently Not Indexed problem on his site. While the solution he found might not be universal to others experiencing this problem, his method for identifying the problem and solving it presents a useful walkthrough for solving technical SEO problems.

What happened to his site indexing was really weird. But his solution was straightforward and makes sense.

A little blog post about a technical SEO issue I had on my tiny website.

In a recent Office-hours hangout someone asked why Google Search Console (GSC) was showing Crawled Not Indexed but when you click through they turn out to be indexed. John Mueller answered that it’s just a lag between reports.

To make matters worse, Google had apparently canonicalized the content on the RSS feed over the actual web page, accounting for why the real web pages were crawled but not indexed.

An odd thing about this case is that when you look at the feed page it renders like a web page and not how an XML file usually renders.

Could that have played a role in why Google chose to canonicalize the feed?

It’s hard to understand how that could happen because there are so many signals like internal linking that under usual circumstances would cause Google to favor the HTML pages as canonical.

Adam wrote that the problem appears to be on Google’s side.

I asked around and someone told me that apparently a few years ago Google started indexing feeds but that he thought this problem had been fixed.