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25/01/2022

Indexing error: This page is not in the index, but not because of an error

In this blog, I am going to talk about an error message you all might have seen in the Google search console when you try to index your pages. Getting their web pages indexed on Google is something that webmaster wants to happen.

Here is a screenshot of what I am referring to:


When you try to submit some of the web pages, you will see this heading:

URL is not on Google

Also, it will be followed by the following message:

This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed

So, why this happens?

Being a leading digital marketing agency in UAE and India, I have seen this error message for many of our clients. Just like anyone else, I too Googled for an answer and found numerous sites discussing this issue. But not a single website gave me a sensible reason that is relevant and valid for our clients.

So, I tried to do some experiments to find out in what scenario this error occurs. After several failed trials, I was finally successful in reproducing this error. Read further to learn how I managed to reproduce this error for a URL of our websites.

My experiment to reproduce the error “This page is not in the index, but not because of an error.“

I am skipping all the failed experiments but here is a scenario where I could reproduce the error stated above.

I prepared a detailed article on the topic “List of e-commerce development companies in Kerala”. Well, for this experiment, the topic doesn’t really matter but I just happen to choose a topic that is relevant for our business, that’s all.

The article had about 830 words and also a unique image that is not used anywhere else.

Next, I opened 2 websites that we manage. The websites I chose are:

           1. techulator.com

           2. indiastudychannel.com

The first one is a technology website and covers a lot of technology topics. The second one is an educational portal but does publish a lot of general topics as well as technology topics.

I composed the same article on both the websites and included the photo as well. The article wasn’t published yet.

Next, I opened 2 instances of search console. On one, I opened the first site and on the second instance, I opened the second website.

Now, I went ahead and published the (same) article on both the sites at the same time and then tried to index the article on both search consoles at the same time using the “URL Inspection” and “Request Indexing”.

Voila, the articles on both the sites got indexed on Google in less than a minute. It happened to index the version on techulator.com a few seconds earlier than the version on IndiaStudyChannel.com

I searched for random text from the article on Google and found Google has indexed both the articles. Well, that’s expected.

A few minutes later, I went back to the Search Console and did a URL inspection again. Surprisingly, on the IndiaStudyChannel version, I got the following message on the console:

URL is not on Google

This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed

I went back to Google and searched for random text from the article. The article on the second site is no longer present on Google search results. Only the version of the article on techulator is present in the Google index now.


Even though I was upset to see that Google removed the indiastudychannel version from its index, I was glad to discover how and why it happened.

What did I learn from the experiment?

So, this is what I learnt from this experiment:

When I submitted the same article on 2 different sites, Google indexed both of them quickly. However, within a few minutes, Google removed the second one from its index since that was an exact match and duplicate of the first one.

So, let me conclude this.

If you see the error “This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed”, that probably means your page was removed from Google’s index since it was found to be a duplicate page or it contains something that Google considers as not worth including in the results.

Possible reasons Google may not index your pages on SERP:

1. Your page contains text that is already present on another URL, in the same site or another site.

2. Your page may contain very generic content that is available in several websites in same or different words.

3. The overall ranking of your website is very poor and so, Google doesn’t trust the content on your website

4. The content on your website is not relevant for your site

5. The content may be spammy or spun content. Google hates spam and spun content.

You are still not able to figure out what is wrong with your page and why it is not getting indexed?

SpiderWorks may be able to help you. With nearly two decades of experience in the digital world, our team of digital marketing experts are pretty good at finding search engine related issues and suggest remedial action.

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