Fixing Indexation Problems on a Cannabis Website

Read the reason, not the total

Search Console › Indexing › Pages sorts every unindexed URL into a named bucket. The raw total is noise. A cannabis menu spits out parameter URLs, filter combinations, and out-of-stock stubs that nobody needs indexed, so a report showing 5,000 excluded pages can be perfectly healthy. What matters is which bucket your money pages sit in. Export the list, filter it to the templates that earn revenue — strain pages, category pages, city pages — and work one reason at a time.

“Crawled — currently not indexed” is a quality verdict

Google fetched the page, looked at it, and decided the index already holds enough copies of it. On cannabis sites this bucket fills up with templated content: strain descriptions pasted from the breeder catalog, product pages that differ only in THC percentage, city pages that swap one name in and out. No technical trick clears it. The page needs material its near-duplicates lack — your own photos, grow notes, terpene test results, local pickup details — or it needs to be folded into a page that has it.

“Discovered — currently not indexed” is a crawl problem

Here Google knows the URL exists, usually from your sitemap, but has not spent the crawl budget to fetch it. Large menus hit this constantly. Thousands of near-identical product URLs teach Googlebot that crawling deeper rarely pays off. Fix it from both directions: link to the stranded pages from pages that already rank, and cut the junk. A short sitemap of pages worth crawling beats a long one padded with every variant.

Duplicate reasons mean canonical conflicts

“Duplicate without user-selected canonical” and its sibling, “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user,” both mean Google is picking its own preferred URL. The usual suspects are sort parameters, http and https versions living side by side, and inconsistent trailing slashes. The fix is agreement. Canonical tags, internal links, and the sitemap must all point at one version of each page. When they disagree, Google decides for you.

Rule out self-inflicted blocks first

Before any content work, spend two minutes on the obvious. A noindex tag left over from staging. A robots.txt Disallow still covering /shop/. An age gate that hands crawlers an interstitial instead of the page. Run a sample URL through the URL Inspection tool and read the crawled HTML yourself. If the content is not in it, no amount of quality improvement will register.

A worked example

A dispensary client had 240 strain pages and 61 of them indexed. The Pages report showed 118 under “Crawled — currently not indexed,” 44 under “Discovered — currently not indexed,” and the rest flagged as duplicates created by ?sort= parameters. We rewrote the 30 best sellers with staff notes and original photos, sent 62 discontinued strains to their category pages with 301s, and canonicalized the parameter URLs. Ten weeks later, 149 of the remaining 178 pages were indexed and the category pages had absorbed the redirected equity.

Frequently asked questions

Is Crawled, currently not indexed a penalty?

No. It is Google deciding the page adds nothing the index does not already have. There is no manual action to appeal and no waiting period. The page goes in once it offers something its near-duplicates do not.

How long after a fix do pages come back?

Weeks, usually. Hit Validate Fix on the reason in the Pages report so you get progress emails, and request indexing manually for a handful of your highest-value URLs rather than all of them.

Should I request indexing for every missing page?

No. The tool is rate-limited, and it only queues a crawl; it does not override the reason a page was excluded. Fix the cause first, then use manual requests to speed up the pages that earn money.