Website not showing up on Google: the checks, in order
You search for your business and the site is not there. It is nearly always one of eight causes, and most of them take minutes to find and fix. Here they are, in the order to check, from a setting someone forgot to a site that is simply new.
Searching for your own business and not finding it is a specific kind of alarming. The causes are fewer than people fear, and most are a setting or a wait rather than a mystery. Check them in this order.
1. Is the site in Google at all?
Search for site:yourdomain.com. If results appear, Google knows the site and the problem is ranking, which is a different question. If nothing appears, the site is not indexed, and the checks below apply.
2. Is it blocked on purpose by accident?
The most common cause after a redesign. WordPress has a checkbox under Settings, Reading, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Developers tick it on the staging copy, then the staging copy becomes the live site with the box still ticked. Untick it. Check also for a noindex tag in the page source, and for a robots.txt file that says Disallow: / to everyone. Our scanner reports the robots file and the indexing tags, so this takes ten seconds to rule out.
3. Is Google being told about it?
Open Search Console. If the site is not there, add it and verify it. Then submit the sitemap, which most platforms generate at /sitemap.xml or /wp-sitemap.xml. Use the address inspection tool on the homepage and request indexing. For a new site, this is often the whole fix, and the site appears within days.
4. Is it new?
A brand new domain with no links pointing at it can take days to weeks to appear, and months to rank for anything competitive. That is normal. Submitting the sitemap and getting a handful of real links speeds it up. Nothing else does.
5. Did the addresses change?
After a redesign or migration, if the old addresses were not redirected to the new ones, Google still has the old ones, they now return “not found”, and the new ones are unknown. Search Console’s Pages report shows this as a pile of “Not found” errors. The fix is redirects from every old address to its new equivalent, then time.
6. Is Google refusing it?
Search Console, under Security and manual actions, tells you if the site was flagged for malware, spam or a rule violation. A manual action removes the site until you fix the cause and request a review. A hacked site can vanish from results for this reason while looking fine to you.
7. Can Google actually read it?
A site that loads all its content with JavaScript that fails, a page that returns an error to crawlers but not to browsers, a server that blocks the crawler’s addresses, a site behind a login. The address inspection tool in Search Console shows you the page as Google sees it. If it is blank, that is the problem.
8. It is there, just not for what you searched
If the site appears for its own name but not for “plumber in your town”, it is indexed and not ranking, which is the normal state of a new or thin site. That is SEO work: a real page for that search, titles that match it, a Google Business Profile, and links. Months, not minutes.
The order matters
Two and three fix most cases in ten minutes. Four and eight are patience and work. Five and six are the ones people miss and the ones that cost the most traffic while they wait. If you are past all eight and still stuck, Search Console’s Pages report will usually name the reason for each address, and that is where we start when someone asks us to look.
See where your own site stands.
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