Why is my website not showing up on Google?

There are about seven reasons a website is missing from Google, and they are nowhere near equally likely. Worked in the right order, most people find their answer in ten minutes. Worked in the wrong order, people spend a month rewriting content when the actual problem was one checkbox.

Start at the top. Do not skip ahead because an earlier item seems too simple.

First, find out what is actually true

Before diagnosing, establish the symptom precisely. "Not showing up" covers three very different situations:

• Google has no record of the site at all. Nothing appears, even when you search your exact business name and town.
• The site is listed but ranks poorly. It appears when you search your business name, but not for anything you sell.
• Some pages are listed and others are not.

Only the first and third are technical problems. The second is a competition problem, and no amount of fixing tags will solve it — that one is answered further down.

To tell them apart, search Google for your business name in quotes along with your town. If your site appears, it is indexed, and you have a ranking problem rather than an indexing one.

1. A noindex tag

This is the most common cause by a distance, and the most frustrating, because it is a single line that overrides everything else you do. It asks search engines to leave the page out of their results, and they comply.

It gets switched on by default in several website builders while a site is being built, and then nobody turns it off on launch day. WordPress has a checkbox for it under Settings → Reading with the label "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".

How to find and remove a noindex tag →

2. robots.txt is blocking the whole site

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow: / underneath User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine not to crawl any page on the site.

Same story as above: it is usually left over from development. It is two words, and it removes a business from search.

How to fix a robots.txt that blocks Google →

3. The site is simply too new

A new domain is not indexed the day it launches. Google has to discover it, crawl it, and decide it is worth storing. For a brand new site with no links pointing at it, a few weeks is ordinary and a couple of months is not alarming.

You can speed up discovery, but you cannot skip it. Two things genuinely help: submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console, and get at least one real link from a site Google already crawls — a supplier, a directory you actually belong in, a local association.

4. You have not set up Search Console

This is not a cause, but it is why most people cannot diagnose the other six. Google Search Console is free, takes about ten minutes to verify, and is the only place Google will tell you directly what it thinks of your site: which pages it has indexed, which it has skipped, and the reason it gives for each.

Everything below this line is much easier to answer once it is connected.

How to create and submit a sitemap →

5. A canonical tag pointing at the wrong page

A canonical tag tells Google which address is the real one when the same page can be reached several ways. When it is wrong — pointing at a staging domain, at a deleted page, or at the homepage from every page on the site — Google honours it and drops the pages you wanted.

This one is worth checking specifically if the site was migrated, duplicated from another site, or built from a template someone else configured.

Canonical tags explained →

6. Pages that error, or a site that is too slow to crawl

If a lot of your pages return errors, or the server is slow enough that crawling times out, Google crawls less and indexes less. This rarely removes an established site outright, but it does explain the "some pages are in, some are not" version of the symptom.

Finding pages that do not load → · Server response time →

7. You are indexed, and simply ranking below the fold

If your site appears when you search its name, none of the above is your problem. You are in the index. You are not ranking for the terms you want, which is a different question with a less satisfying answer.

Ranking depends on how many other sites are competing for the same search, how established they are, how many credible sites link to them, and whether your page answers the question better than theirs. None of that is fixed by tags. It is fixed by being genuinely more useful on a specific subject than the pages currently above you, and by being around long enough for that to be recognised.

The technical work in items 1–6 does not make you rank. It removes the reasons you cannot.

The ten-minute version

1. Search your business name in quotes. If you appear, skip to item 7 above.
2. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /.
3. View your homepage source and search the text for noindex.
4. Set up Google Search Console and submit a sitemap.
5. If the site is under two months old with no inbound links, the answer is probably patience.

If you would rather have all of that checked at once, run a free audit below. It tests every item on this list and tells you which one applies to you.