You open the Page indexing report, expecting a simple count, and find a list of statuses that read like a school report. Crawled but not indexed. Discovered but not indexed. Duplicate without user-selected canonical. It sounds like a series of failures.
Mostly it is not. Google says so itself, in a sentence worth keeping: not indexed is not necessarily bad. Some pages should not be indexed, and a healthy site has plenty of them.
Here is what each status actually means, in Google's own words rather than an interpretation, and what to do about the two that cause the most anxiety.
The two that worry people
Discovered, currently not indexed. Google's definition: the page was found but not crawled yet. Google wanted to crawl it, expected that doing so would overload the site, and rescheduled. That is why the last crawl date is empty.
Read that again, because it matters. Google attributes this to its own crawl scheduling and to your server's capacity. It says nothing about the quality of your content. The very common claim that this status means Google judged your page not worth indexing has no support in Google's documentation. The only practical suggestion Google attaches is about hosting: make sure the server is not down, overloaded or misconfigured, and if connection or timeout problems persist, speak to your host about handling more traffic.
Crawled, currently not indexed. Google's definition: the page was crawled but not indexed, it may or may not be indexed in future, and, in Google's own words, there is no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.
That last clause is the whole answer, and it is the opposite of what most articles tell you. The standard advice is to keep hitting request indexing until something happens. Google has written down that you do not need to.
The ones that are just bookkeeping
Page with redirect. This address redirects somewhere else, so it will not be indexed. Whether the destination gets indexed depends on what Google thinks of the destination. Normal, and usually intentional.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag. The page correctly points at another page as the original, and that one is indexed. Google's own comment is that there is nothing you need to do.
Duplicate without user-selected canonical. This page duplicates another one and did not say which version is the original, so Google picked. Google describes this as not an error, and as working as intended, because it does not serve duplicate pages.
The ones you asked for, whether you meant to or not
URL marked noindex. Google found an instruction telling it not to index the page, and obeyed. If that was deliberate, nothing to do. If it was not, remove the directive. Note the current wording. If an article tells you this status is called "excluded by noindex tag", it is describing a version of Search Console that no longer exists.
URL blocked by robots.txt. Your robots file blocked it. Worth knowing that this does not guarantee the page stays out of the index. Google says that if it can find enough about the page from elsewhere, there is a small chance it gets indexed anyway, and that to be certain, you remove the robots block and use a noindex directive instead. Blocking and excluding are not the same instruction, and people use them interchangeably.
The ones that are genuinely broken
Soft 404. The page shows a friendly "not found" message but returns a success code instead of a 404. Google asks for a real 404 code on pages that genuinely do not exist.
Not found (404). The page returned a 404. Google says this is not necessarily a problem if the page was removed and has no replacement. If it moved, use a 301 redirect. There is no way to make Google forget a URL permanently, though it will try less and less often.
Server error (5xx). Your server failed while Google was asking. This one is worth chasing, because it affects visitors as much as crawlers.
What about requesting indexing
It helps once and then stops helping. Google says that adding new content can take a few days to be indexed and that requesting indexing reduces that lag. It also says there is a quota on individual submissions, and that requesting a recrawl of the same URL repeatedly will not get it crawled any faster. Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
Both statements are Google's and they do not contradict each other. Request once for something new. Do not sit there resubmitting.
For anything more than a handful of pages, Google's documented method is a sitemap, not the inspection tool.
And crawl budget, which you can ignore
Crawl budget is the most oversold concept in this whole area for a normal business. Google's guide on it opens by telling most people not to read it, and names its intended audience as sites with over a million pages that change weekly, or over ten thousand pages that change daily.
If your site has forty pages, crawl budget is not your problem and nobody should be selling you work on it.
The sane way to read the report
Google's own advice is the right advice. Do not expect every page to be indexed. Read the reason for each one and confirm the page genuinely should not be. Make sure your important pages are in.
And keep one more of Google's sentences in mind, because it saves a lot of wasted effort: being indexed does not guarantee you will show up in search results. Indexing gets you into the room. It does not get you heard.
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