The Indexing Quality Crisis: Stop Google From “Forgetting” Your Pages

Today, we’re diving deep into a severe, but often invisible, technical problem facing large websites: the Indexing Quality Crisis, or what some Googlers refer to as Google “forgetting” your pages. This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario; it is a critical issue impacting site coverage, especially for large publishers and e-commerce sites.

Historically, SEO focused on ensuring Google could crawl and index your content. Now, even if Google can crawl a page, it might choose to de-index it or simply “forget” it exists if it doesn’t meet certain quality and engagement thresholds. We have data from the Google Search Index that indicates a page that hasn’t been crawled in approximately 130 days is removed from search results, and if it’s not crawled within 190 days, it is likely to be completely forgotten by the system, moving its status to “URL is Unknown to Google”.

This process is governed by internal metrics, including the URL’s Importance Rank. When Google hits its soft index limit, it prioritizes content, and pages that fall below that threshold are removed. This index quality issue is responsible for a massive 88% of the “Not Indexed” errors seen in Google Search Console, based on analysis of millions of pages.

What drives this “forgetting” process?

Google employs what are called Page-Level and Domain-Level Quality signals.

At the page level, three problems are commonly seen:

1. The pages do not have unique indexable content.
2. The indexable pages are not linked to from other important pages.
3. The indexable pages weren’t ranking for queries or driving relevant clicks.

In fact, if Google ranks your page but finds that searchers are not clicking on it or interacting with it, Google may remove that page from search results in the future.

At the domain level, indexing issues can be tied to sitewide quality problems, the site not driving any brand clicks, or the website not being linked to by relevant, high-quality websites.

What you need to do immediately:

1. Look for URLs categorized as “Crawled – currently not indexed” in your Google Search Console. These are pages that Google previously indexed but is no longer serving in search results, often signaling a quality review.
2. Reinforce your internal linking structure. Pages that aren’t linked to from other important pages are vulnerable to being forgotten. 
3. Ensure that every page you want indexed is truly valuable to the user, driving engagement and clicks, which is a signal Google monitors closely using its internal metrics like Glue—a massive table of user activity tracking queries, clicks, and how long users linger on a page.

Finally, if you have a large site and are managing complex subdomains, be aware of the scale of the challenge. I’ve personally found government clients with up to 150 different unmaintained subdomains, many of which can compromise site quality and SEO efforts, so actively seek and audit these sub-properties.

So that’s your SEO tip for today – Stop ignoring the Indexing Quality Crisis by checking your crawl metrics and ensuring every URL contributes unique value and is internally linked. 

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

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