Guide Search visibility
Why your website is not showing up on Google
By Studio Swing
A website that does not show up on Google is in one of two situations, and the fix for each is different. Either Google has not put your pages in its index, so they cannot appear for any search. Or the pages are in the index but sit too far down for the searches you care about. Check the first before the second, because a page that is not indexed cannot rank at all. This guide takes the causes in the order you should check them: indexing, then crawling, then quality, then competition. It cannot promise that any page will be indexed or will rank, and neither can anyone else.
On this page
- 01A bakery that cannot find itself
- 02Step 1: Find out whether the page is in Google at all
- 03Step 2: Check whether something is telling Google to stay away
- 04Step 3: Check whether Google can find the page yet
- 05Step 4: Crawled but not kept
- 06Step 5: Indexed, but not where you expected
- 07Step 6: Rare, but worth ruling out
- 08What this guide will not do
- 09A checklist you can use without us
- 10Where to go next
- 11Sources
A bakery that cannot find itself
Say you run a bakery that makes celebration cakes. Your new website went live six weeks ago. A friend searches "custom birthday cakes" plus your town and does not see you. You search your own bakery's name and your homepage appears, but the page about birthday cakes is nowhere. Is the site broken? Is Google ignoring you?
Those are three different questions, and they have three different answers. Your homepage shows, so the site is in Google. The cakes page may not be indexed at all, which is an indexing problem. Or it may be indexed and appear on page six for a competitive search, which is a ranking problem. Guessing between them wastes weeks. Two free checks tell you which one you have.
Step 1: Find out whether the page is in Google at all
There are two checks, and neither needs special skills.
Search for the page address. Google's Search Console help suggests searching site: followed by the exact address of a page, for example site:yourbakery.com/birthday-cakes. Try your homepage and your most important pages. If a result points to your page, it is indexed.
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Search Console is Google's free tool for site owners, and our guide to Google Analytics and Search Console explains how to set it up. Paste a page address into its URL Inspection tool. It reports what Google knows about that page and, when the page is not indexed, gives a reason. Google adds a caution worth remembering: "URL is on Google" does not guarantee the page will appear for any particular search. Being in the index is necessary, not sufficient.
If the page is indexed, skip to step 5. If it is not, continue.
Step 2: Check whether something is telling Google to stay away
Most unindexed pages on a new site are not a mystery. Something in the page or the site blocks them. Google's technical requirements for indexing are short: Googlebot (Google's crawler) must not be blocked, the page must work and return a success status, and the page must have indexable content. Check these in turn.
A noindex instruction. A page can carry a small instruction, called noindex, that tells Google to drop it from results. Google says that when it crawls a page and finds the tag, "Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results." This is common on a staging copy of a site, which developers deliberately hide while it is built. If the setting travels with the site to the live version, your pages stay invisible. Search Console's Page indexing report lists these as "URL marked 'noindex'". If you want the page indexed, the instruction has to go.
A robots.txt block. The robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of a site they may visit. A rule that blocks your pages stops Google from reading them. Google notes that a blocked page can still occasionally appear with no description if other sites link to it, but you should not count on it. Do not combine the two instructions: if robots.txt blocks a page, Google never sees a noindex on it, so the page can behave in ways you did not intend.
A login or a private page. Google only indexes pages that are accessible to the public. A page behind a login, or a whole site on a password while it is being built, will not be crawled.
An error instead of a page. Google indexes only pages served with a success status (HTTP 200). A page returning a server error, a 404, or a forbidden response will not be indexed. "Soft 404" is a related label: the page looks like a "not found" page to Google even though the server calls it a success.
A redirect. Google says redirect URLs are not indexed, only the page they lead to. If your old address now redirects to a new one, the new address is what you want in the index.
A duplicate. Google does not index duplicate copies of a page. If the same content lives at several addresses, it picks one as the main version (the canonical) and leaves the rest out. Search Console labels this as a duplicate or alternate page, and Google says that is usually working as intended. It is only a problem when Google has chosen a version you did not want.
If you find one of these on a page you want in Google, ask whoever built the site to fix it and to tell you what changed. Our checklist at the end covers the questions to ask.
Step 3: Check whether Google can find the page yet
If nothing blocks the page, the next question is whether Google knows it exists. Google says it finds pages in three ways: pages it has already visited, links from a known page to a new page, and a sitemap you submit.
For a brand new site, this matters more than most people expect. Google's sitemap guidance says a sitemap helps if "your site is new and has few external links to it," because crawlers follow links and "might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them." A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want Google to know about. Many site builders create one automatically.
Three practical points, all from Google's own guidance:
- Every important page should be reachable through your own menu or links between pages. A page that nothing links to is hard to find.
- Search Console's own help says that for a site that is not being discovered, a first step is to request indexing of your homepage, which should start Google crawling the site.
- Time is part of the answer. Search Console's help says it "can take a week or so" for Google to start crawling and indexing a new page or site, and that after a page is known it can take "up to a few weeks" before Google crawls some or all of a site. Indexing is "never instant, even when you submit a crawl request directly."
So if the site is three days old, the honest first step is to wait, check that nothing blocks it, and request indexing for the homepage. Repeated requests do not speed things up: Google says asking again for the same address will not get it crawled any faster.
Step 4: Crawled but not kept
Search Console can show a status called "Crawled - currently not indexed." Google describes it plainly: the page was crawled but not indexed, and "it may or may not be indexed in the future." A neighbouring status, "Discovered - currently not indexed", means Google found the page but has not visited it yet, typically because it expected the crawl to overload the site.
Google also states that "indexing isn't guaranteed; not every page that Google processes will be indexed," and lists the quality of the content among the reasons a page might not be. It says it does not guarantee to crawl, index or serve a page even when the page follows its guidelines. You cannot force a page in. What you can do is make the page worth keeping.
Google's own questions for judging a page are a useful test. Does it provide original information? Does it describe the topic substantially and completely? Does it add real value compared with other pages in the results? Is it the sort of page you would bookmark or recommend to a friend? Thin pages that repeat another page, or pages that exist only to catch a search phrase, fail these questions. A cakes page with two sentences and a photo gallery has little to keep.
Our guide to what SEO does for a business website explains why each important question should have one clear page. If you have several pages saying nearly the same thing, merging them is often a better fix than adding more.
Step 5: Indexed, but not where you expected
If the page is indexed and still does not appear for the search you tried, the problem is no longer technical. Three things can be going on.
You tried one search from one place. Google says relevance "is determined by hundreds of factors, which could include information such as the user's location, language, and device." Search Console's help adds that results are customized for each user's search history and location, so an indexed page "won't show up in every search, or in the same ranking when it does." Checking from your own phone, signed in, in your own town, tells you what you see, not what a stranger sees. Search Console's Performance report shows how often your pages were actually shown, for which searches, and at what average position.
The page does not match the search. The bakery's cakes page may say "bespoke celebration confectionery" while customers type "custom birthday cake". Reading the searches in Search Console shows the words people actually use. The page should say plainly what it offers, where, and for whom.
Other pages answer the question better. For a competitive search, there may be many strong results already. Nobody can promise that a page will move above them. What you can do is give the searcher something the others do not: specific details, real photographs, clear prices or ranges where you are free to show them, and an easy next step.
Step 6: Rare, but worth ruling out
Search Console has a Manual actions report. Google issues a manual action when a human reviewer decides a site breaks its spam policies, and the affected pages can be ranked lower or left out of results. If there is one, Google notifies you in that report and in the Search Console message center. A site with no manual action shows a green check mark. A new, honestly built site almost never has one, but the report takes a minute to open, and if you bought an older domain it is worth checking first.
What this guide will not do
It will not tell you how long you should wait. Google says some changes take effect in hours and others take months, and our guide on how long SEO takes to work covers what the time depends on. It will not tell you what to do first on a site that has not launched; that is in SEO for a new website. And it cannot make a page appear. Google is explicit that it does not accept payment to include or rank a site, so any offer to "submit your site to Google" for a fee is selling something you can do yourself for nothing.
A checklist you can use without us
- Search
site:plus your homepage address, then your three most important pages. Note which appear. - Verify your site in Search Console and paste each missing page into URL Inspection. Write down the reason it gives.
- If the reason is noindex, a robots.txt block, a login, or an error, ask whoever manages the site to fix it, then use "Request indexing" and wait.
- Check that every important page is linked from your menu or from another page, and that a sitemap exists.
- If the page is crawled but not indexed, compare it honestly with the pages that do appear for that search. Does it say more, with more detail?
- If the page is indexed, look at the Performance report for the searches that show it. Check whether the words on the page match the words customers use.
- Open the Manual actions report once to confirm it shows no action.
- Give changes time before judging them, and change one thing at a time so you know which helped.
Where to go next
If you would like search planned into your site before it is designed, our SEO service explains what you receive. We research what your customers search for, plan where each search is answered, and list the technical problems that stop Google reading your pages. Before launch, we check titles, descriptions, the sitemap and redirects. We do not promise rankings, traffic or sales.
Next, read SEO for a new website: what to do first. When you want to talk about your own site, you can discuss your project with us. More guides are in the Learn library.
Sources
Google Search Central, Google Search technical requirements: https:/
Google Search Central, In-depth guide to how Google Search works: https:/
Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex: https:/
Google Search Central, Introduction to robots.txt: https:/
Google Search Central, Learn about sitemaps: https:/
Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs: https:/
Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content: https:/
Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide: https:/
Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?: https:/
Search Console Help, Page indexing report: https:/
Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool: https:/
Search Console Help, Manual actions report: https:/
Search Console Help, Performance report (search results): https:/