Google Search Console: Number of "Discovered - Not Indexed" Pages dropping

[veloman]

Hello!

I had a search on Google and Bing for an answer to this, but the results are just SEO games pages with no relevancy.

Basically as I understand it, when Google finds a page (i.e. after submitting a sitemap) it gets added to the "Discovered - Not Indexed" list, and then over time it'll slowly drop as they get moved to the "Indexed" list.

Strangely though, I had roughly 80 pages marked as discovered, then one day they vanished and there were 0. They weren't added to the Index List (although it is slowly increasing), Google just seems to have erased them and I can't for the life of me find out why.

My robots.txt is fine, the pages are all accessable, there is no reported problem with the pages... It's just a bit of a mystery.

Don't suppose anyone knows what the issue might be?

Thanks!

 

[Tracy]

For Google... Google does what Google does.. there is no firm answer.
As Scooby says, "Rotsa Ruck" when trying to figure out how they "work" their scheme.

 

[veloman]

Sometimes I wonder if Google's algorithms are now so complex that even they don't know how it works... The old black box problem 🤔