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A spot of trouble with Google's console.
I've experienced something weird about Google's page indexing console. It has a page, it drops the page with a non-descriptive error. The error is fixed, and it claims that the page should be possible to index once more, it is marked for reindexing, but it never does this. So over the past few years, whenever Google invents a new reason why a page should not be indexed, these pages become harder and harder to search for. A few years ago, that meant it had some 60 pages indexed. Now in mid-2026 that number is 0.
The latest error given is a Redirect error. Which is weird because if it uses present links on the site and sitemaps, these redirecting links have not been present for a year. I.e. it's either finding a link off-site, or has the very old link buffered, failing to update their internal link database with the new link (permanent redirect.) The Redirect error has no fail cause listed, because, why would they include useful information. Possible errors according to Google:
- A redirect chain that was too long
- It's a single redirect.
- A redirect loop
- Again, it's a single redirect that goes from one url to another.
- A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length
- No. Not a single URL on this site exceeds 2000 characters. Or even half that.
- A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain
- The redirect is perfectly valid.
Then we have the big sinner: Crawled - currently not indexed. This is where most of my pages lie within Google's view. Not errors per se. Just not - suddenly - indexed. They ended up there after fixing the sudden Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user and other Alternate page with proper canonical tag errors where the canon pages were indexed before.
And then we have the Soft 404 errors that I can only assume are from a bug on Google's end. However, as always, this doesn't mean they try again later, but just quietly drops the URL.
Actual Not found (404) as they scan the server when it's in the middle of a back-up of the database and thus apparently cannot retrieve the pages. Fair enough, but when testing them 10 minutes later, where they load fine - why not drop the error report?
Finally, we have the Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag - which isn't an error, but it's interesting to see it keeps those pages memorised as *don't index* when it quietly applies the same to the other pages too.
in the menues.