Everyone checks the Performance tab and ignores the rest. The Page indexing report is where the real problems show up for me.
What I use it for:
– “Crawled – currently not indexed” = usually thin or duplicate pages, good list for pruning
– “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” = tells you where your canonicals are being ignored
– Validate fix button after cleanup, then watch the count drop
Free, straight from Google, and more honest than any third party tool about what’s actually indexed.
+1 on “Crawled – currently not indexed”. One thing to add: export that list and check it against your sitemap. If a lot of those URLs are in the sitemap, you’re telling Google they’re important while Google disagrees. Either improve them or drop them from the sitemap.
The URL Inspection tool is also underused. Live test shows you the rendered HTML Google sees, which is how I caught a lazy-load plugin hiding half the content from Googlebot.
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