Updated September 29, 2025

In this article, we’ll discuss what to do when you receive an email from Google Search Console. These emails usually mention an error (or multiple) that you need to correct, but knowing what to do next can be difficult, especially if you’ve never worked with Google Search Console (GSC) before. Let’s dive in and learn how to fix the most common Google Search Console errors!

We’ll start by explaining what Google Search Console actually does. Then, we’ll look at the key GSC tools you’ll use to handle its alerts. Finally, we’ll walk through the most common errors step by step, so you know exactly how to fix them.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this guide:

What is Google Search Console (GSC)?

Google Search Console is a tool that helps website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in the Google search engine. With Google Search Console, you can check how Google sees your website, see which keywords are driving traffic to your site, and get alerts when there are errors or other issues that can affect your website’s visibility on Google. These notifications can be critical, non-critical, or purely informational. Knowing the difference is key to deciding when action is needed.

It’s important to understand that these alerts don’t mean your website is broken. These alerts are mostly about your website’s performance in Google search results.

How Google Indexing Works

Before we dive into specific errors, it’s helpful to be familiar with the stages Google goes through when deciding which pages show up in search results. This will help you analyze the notifications or errors and decide how you would troubleshoot them further.

1. Discovery – Google first becomes aware of your pages, either by following links from other pages or through a sitemap you’ve submitted. But still haven’t done anything yet to assess or gather information regarding your pages.
2. Crawling – After the website or page discovery, Google’s crawlers (robots) visit the page to gather information about its content and structure. However, Google still hasn’t added your pages to the search results.
3. Indexing – After crawling, Google decides whether to store the page in its index so it can appear in search results.

If a page doesn’t make it all the way through these steps, you’ll often see “currently not indexed”, “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”, or other messages in Google Search Console. You can address the issues and wait for Google to index them, or you can manually request indexing.

How to Manually Request Indexing

1. Enter the page URL in the GSC search bar at the top.
2. Click Request Indexing to ask Google to recrawl the page.
3. This doesn’t guarantee indexing, but it can speed up the process.

If you’re not sure if you need to request indexing for a page, you can find the list of all the page errors and start analyzing from there.

How to Find the Page Errors List in GSC

1. In the left-hand menu, click Pages (under the Indexing section).
2. Scroll down the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section, and you’ll see a breakdown of the errors and notifications Google had sent you.
3. Click on any error reason to expand it and view the specific URLs affected.

You can click a URL to inspect it, which provides more details about it and its issues, or just monitor all the URLs and see if they’re being crawled regularly by checking the “Last crawled” tab.

How to Validate a Fix

After resolving the errors (discussed below, under the Common Google Search Console Errors section) on a particular error type, it’s now time to submit a validation request to Google. With this, you’re actively telling Google that you’ve made changes and would like them to review the affected pages again.

To do this:

1. In Google Search Console, click the specific “error reason” for the issue you fixed.
2. At the top of the report, click the VALIDATE FIX button.
3. Google will then begin rechecking the affected URLs.
4. Monitor the Validation status for Google’s update.

The validation process can take from several days to a few weeks, up to several months, depending on Google’s own schedule and how many URLs are involved in your validation request. You can always click any of the error reasons to view its validation status and see the updates.

Common Google Search Console Errors:

Crawled – currently not indexed

This error means that Google’s search robots, also known as “crawlers,” have found your website and processed it, but it hasn’t yet been added to Google’s search results. This process is briefly explained in the How Google Indexing Works section above.

However, to put it in simpler terms, imagine that Google search results are like a library with shelves and books. Google’s crawlers are like librarians who go around collecting information about all the books in the library.

However, just because the librarian has gathered details about a book, it doesn’t mean that the book has been placed on the shelf for readers to find. In the same way, just because Google’s crawlers have crawled your website, it doesn’t mean that your website will display in Google search results.

Solution:

If you see this message, most of the time it means that Google just needs more time to process certain pages on your website for them to show in Google search results. You have to remember, Google crawls billions of pages each day.

If, after several crawl attempts by Google and you still see the page marked as “Crawled – currently not indexed,” it may mean Google has decided the page isn’t valuable enough to index. For example, it could have low-quality or thin content, poor internal linking, or other technical issues. If you want the page to be considered for indexing, update the content and then manually request indexing in Google Search Console.

Discovered – currently not indexed

This is very similar to “Crawled – currently not indexed,” section above, and is just part of the regular indexing process (discussed in How Google Indexing Works section), but with one important difference: in this case, Google has found your page (it’s “discovered”), but it hasn’t actually crawled it yet.

Using the library analogy, it’s like the librarian noticing a new book sitting in the corner but not opening it to check what’s inside. The librarian knows the book exists, but hasn’t had the time—or hasn’t decided yet—to review it and add it to the catalog.

Solution:

In most cases, this happens because Google is prioritizing other pages or managing its resources across billions of sites. You can wait for Google to crawl and index the page, or you can manually request indexing in Google Search Console.

Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag

This is a high-priority or critical error that you’ll want to address. This error means Google is being told by your website not to index certain pages on your website. The rule that tells this to Google might come from a few different sources, such as your SEO plugin (like Yoast), .htaccess file, or other site settings. This can be a big problem if you’re trying to get your website or pages found in Google search results. If you get an error like this, it’s best to address it straightaway.

Some of the most common fixes are described below.

Solution:

WordPress Reading Settings:

1. Log in to your website admin panel.
2. Go to Settings > Reading
3. Beside the “Search engine visibility”, ensure that the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not ticked.
4. Click Save Changes.

Yoast SEO:

1. Log in to your website admin panel.
2. Open the URL in question, and click Edit Page.
3. Scroll down under the Yoast SEO tab and open the Advanced tab.
4. Under the “Allow search engines to show this content in search results?”, change it to Yes.
5. Save the changes by clicking the Save button in the top right corner of the page.

These two are the most common solutions. If there’s no issue with the WordPress Reading Settings and the Yoast SEO settings, you may need to contact your developer. For our Wellness Pro Website System clients, feel free to contact us at help@whitneybateson.com.

After fixing the issue on your pages or website, you may manually request indexing in Search Console or start a Validation Request.

Not found – 404

One of the critical Google Search Console messages you might get is a 404 error. This means Google sees a link on your site that cannot be found as a physical page. Using the library analogy I mentioned earlier, imagine a library where all the books are neatly organized on the shelves according to their unique call numbers. 

When you walk into the library and ask the librarian for a specific book, the librarian can easily direct you to the right shelf where the book is located. But what if the book is not on the shelf? The librarian would tell you that the book is not available, and you would leave the library empty-handed (no one likes that!).

In the same way, a 404 page error occurs when a user tries to access a specific page on your website, but the page is not available or cannot be found. When this happens, Google responds with a 404 error code indicating that the requested page is missing. It’s important to address these 404 errors because they can negatively impact website traffic, SEO, and ruin the user experience.

Solution:

Resolving a 404 error can depend on the circumstances. If the page has been permanently deleted, you should set up a 410, using the Redirection plugin, to let Google know the page is gone for good.

However, if you just decided to change the slug for a page to something else, make sure that you set up a redirect going to the new URL slug. This way, users who try to access the old page will automatically be redirected to the new one.

In some cases, a 404 error may be caused by a mistake. If you accidentally deleted a page or set it to private, in this case, you should restore that accidentally deleted page or set that page from private to published again.

Page with redirect

This means there’s a page or pages that have been redirected to another URL. The redirects are detected by Google, and it’s only notifying you of the situation.

Most of the time, this isn’t an ‘error’ and is just a notification, so you can freely disregard them. Sometimes, you’ll see many URLS redirected due to many different reasons. The most common reason is that the WordPress or the CMS you’re using is automatically implementing redirection rules. Some of them are:

• When someone enters a wrong URL, WordPress sometimes predicts the URL the site visitor is trying to access and automatically redirects them to the “correct” URL.
• When you unpublish a page or post, WordPress automatically creates a redirection rule so that if a site visitor tries to access the URL, they will be redirected to another page.
• When someone opens a link that doesn’t end in “/”, WordPress redirects them to the version of the URL with “/” at the end. For example, if you open https://whitneybateson.com/fix-google-search-console-errors, you’ll notice that the final URL that loads is https://whitneybateson.com/fix-google-search-console-errors/ (notice the / at the end). They’re the same page, FYI.

Solution:

You can check if the redirect is just right or isn’t redirecting properly. You can then find the rule that is causing the URL to redirect incorrectly, and then fix it. If the redirection is just right, you can leave it as is, and Google will learn that it’s on purpose and will eventually stop notifying you about the redirections on these URLs.

Quick tip: You can check all the buttons and hyperlinks you have on the site and add “/” at the end of the URLs if the links still don’t have it. This has no huge effect, but if you want to see a clearer “page with redirect” section on your Google Search Console, this would help.

Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

This message means that Google has found multiple versions of the same content on your website, and it has picked a version that it thinks is the most relevant to show in search results, which is different from the version you specified as the right one.

As an example, let’s say your website has a page called “Consulting Services.” The page is accessible through multiple URLs, such as “yourwebsite.com/consulting-services/”. And then there’s a second URL that’s very similar, but it’s “yourwebsite.com/consulting-services?index=1”. Sometimes this happens in WordPress sites where a URL with some weird characters latches onto a proper URL and makes its way to Google. Google usually will only index the first one – the one with the proper URL to avoid any potential duplication issues.

Solution:

1. Hover over the URL and click the Inspect URL icon (magnifying glass).
2. Wait for the page details to load and then scroll down to “Google-selected canonical”.
3. If this is the correct URL that you want Google to index, leave it as is. Google will eventually learn that it’s just right and will eventually stop sending you this notification.
4. If this isn’t the correct URL, update the page’s canonical URL:
   1. Log in to your website admin panel.
   2. Open the URL in question, and click Edit Page.
   3. Scroll down under the Yoast SEO tab and open the Advanced tab.
   4. Update the Canonical URL, then click Save.

What About Other Errors?

If you receive an email from GSC about some other kind of error not listed here, there will always be a link in that email. Click on the link from Google, then look for the ‘Help Article’ to see if that can help you. (Note: Sometimes the explanation can be very technical.)

You can also try Googling! Search “How to fix [copy and paste the name of the error]” and find an article or blog post that can give you guidance on how to fix it. If you’re having this issue, likely some else has too and has found a solution! We’ll also regularly update this article, so feel free to come back and be updated with the easiest and best ways to clear up your Google Search Console alerts!

Fix Google Search Console Errors Without the Stress!

We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful, and at the least, come to understand that GSC errors are meant to be helpful, and are nothing to be concerned or overly worried about. Most of the time, they are easy to resolve, and aren’t “website emergencies” you need to feel pressured to address ASAP. GSC is a great tool for ensuring your website is ranking well in Google search results!