Content is indexed, no keywords appear in GSC

[jediviper]

Hi everyone,
I have another interesting topic to ask for your opinion.

First of all, can a piece of content that is indexed to be penalised somehow by Google so it doesn't appear in SERP for any kws?

I have these new websites that I am working at and which are based on JS.
Till recently there was just a very small part of content added for the main pages and the only kws that were appearing in GSC were some branded kws.
15 days ago I added at a specific main page a piece of content in English of around 4.000 kws.
Then a week later I added the Italian translation of that text. Both parts are indexed by Google, as the use of the site operator -together with some specific phrases- shows.

Till know, I see no increase at the kws that appear in GSC and I heard from a source, that if some part of the content is copied by another site, then you may get penalised and get no kws in GSC.
As the English text was provided ready from another internal source, I have noticed later that indeed some parts of it are copied by some other sources. So, I wonder if indeed Google is blocking these kws from appearing at GSC.

On the other hand, if this is the case about the English text, then why the Italian text doesn't have any better luck, as it's translated from the EN text and therefore it should be a unique piece of text?

[lucy24]

Two preliminary suggestions:

#1 In general, almost everything you see in GSC can be ignored for at least a month while glitches get sorted out. Sometimes longer; sometimes forever.

#2 Try to forget that you have ever heard the word “keyword”.

[NickMNS]

Absolutely what Lucy said.

I would simply add:
GSC provides insight into what "queries" are actually used by users to get to your website. For a "query" to appear in GSC your website must appear and be seen in the search result (get an impression) for that query to be counted. To be seen your website must rank for that query. Ranking and indexing are two separate things, Google indexes a lot of content but only the most suitable content achieves a high rank for a given query. Given that you are referring to a new website, it should be expected that content is "indexed" but does not rank. Give it time.

Note that this is fundamentally different from how 3rd party keyword tools work. The 3rd party tools, make frequent queries to Google for a given "keyword", then parse the result to some arbitrary depth (I assume something like the top 100 results) and then map website to a position. A low ranking is counted despite the fact, that users rarely go past page 2. (note: I don't mean user never go past page two, I mean the result is counted in every case even if the frequency of user visits of pages greater than two is a rare occurrence).

Moreover and regarding Lucy24's point #2:
The same query may return a complete different set of results for two different users. But the 3rd party tools are unable to account for this. So a "keyword" may appear to frequently rank high according to the 3rd party tool but not to GSC.

I seem to have digressed, but not really.
GSC only shows a sample of all the queries used. So a 3rd party tool may list a "keyword" as relevant but given that GSC may rank that "keyword" differently and that it only show a sample of relevant "keywords" it stands to reason that not seeing specific "keyword" is to be expected, specially over the short term. Overtime, these less frequent but relevant keywords will likely begin to appear.

[jediviper]

Thank you both for your insights, which are connected to the why some kws do no appear at the GSC.

But what about the penalised part? Do you have any info if such thing as penalised text exist? So that the content can be crawled but cannot rank for any kws, because Google is blocking it somehow?

I don't know if it's connected, but recently I have noticed something strange with the metadata, that I have updated 3 weeks ago for some pages, but appear differently at different sources! For example, for an indexed page with last crawling on the 25/7, I see that:
1) in GSC, I use the url inspection for this specific url and then I check the "Crawled page" results. The Meta title & description are the old one..
2) at Chrome, I inspect the page and at the Dev Tools, I check the code under the Elements tab. The new/changed Metadata appear!

How is this possible?

[NickMNS]

How is this possible?

After you entered the URL in the inspection tool and got the result, did you click the "test live url" button in the top right corner?

[jediviper]

I also clicked on "test live url" and then checked the results of the "Tested page".
Same thing.