Why your website isn't showing up on Google

There's a pattern we see often enough now that we check for it before anything else. An owner tells us their website isn't on Google. We run one search, and the site is there. Indexed, crawled, perfectly visible, sitting somewhere on page three or four for a phrase the owner typed and no customer ever would.

That's not an indexing problem. That's a ranking problem wearing an indexing problem's coat, and the two need completely different work. One is a settings fix that takes ten minutes. The other is months.

The odd part is which one people assume they have. Almost everyone assumes the worst case, that Google has never seen the site at all. In practice that's the rarer of the two, and when it does happen the cause is usually something switched on during the build and never switched off.

Two minutes to find out which one you've got

Type site: followed by your domain into Google, no space. site:yourbusiness.com.au.

What comes back is roughly everything Google has in its index for you. If your pages are listed, you're indexed, and you can stop worrying about that half of the problem. If nothing comes back, or three pages come back when you have twenty, something is blocking it.

Do this before you spend money with anyone. I've sat in meetings where a proposal for six months of content was being pitched to fix what turned out to be a tick box in the site's settings.

The setting that hides an entire site

Most sites get built somewhere private first, on a staging address, and while they're there they're told to keep out of search results. Sometimes with a robots.txt rule, more often with a noindex tag in the page head. Both are the correct thing to do at that point.

Launch day is busy. That flag doesn't always come off.

We've inherited three sites in the last couple of years that were quietly wearing a noindex months after going live. In one case the business had been paying for SEO the entire time, and nobody in that arrangement had run the two-minute check above. Google's documentation on blocking indexing covers what the tag does. What it can't tell you is how ordinary it is to leave it on.

The other version of this is a robots.txt file that still says Disallow: /, which tells crawlers not to look at anything. Visit yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt and read it. If you see that line, that's your answer.

Both of these are one-line fixes, and both are worth checking today rather than at some point.

If it's a new site or a new page, it might just be early

A site that went live three weeks ago and isn't fully indexed is normal. Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps, then decides what's worth keeping. That takes days for some pages and considerably longer for others, and there is no button that skips the queue.

You can nudge it. Submit your sitemap in Search Console, then use URL Inspection on the pages that matter most and request indexing for each. It's a request, not an instruction, but it does tend to move things along.

What doesn't help is the thing people reach for instead: resubmitting the whole site repeatedly, or paying someone to "submit to 500 search engines". That last one has been useless for about fifteen years and still sells.

Seen, considered, skipped

The more frustrating case is a page Google has definitely crawled and has chosen not to index. Search Console names this one plainly: "Crawled, currently not indexed". No error, no penalty, just a shrug.

It usually means the page didn't earn its slot. Four sentences under a heading. A suburb page identical to eleven others with the place name swapped, which we went into in the local SEO piece. A service page that repeats what the homepage already said.

Google is under no obligation to store a copy of everything. When it skips a page, the fix isn't technical. Someone has to make that page worth having, which is slower and less satisfying than finding a broken setting, but it's the honest answer.

The same goes for pages nothing links to. If a page can only be reached by typing its address, it's effectively a stranger. Link to it from the relevant service page or the navigation and it stops being one.

The ranking half, briefly

Say the check comes back clean and everything is indexed. Then what you have is the ordinary work of ranking, and the order of it matters more than the volume. We laid out that order in what to do first, and for local businesses the fastest ground is still off the site entirely, on the Google Business Profile.

Worth saying: being indexed and being findable aren't the same thing. Your site can be in the index for a phrase nobody searches. Ranking first for "commercial refrigeration repairs Unanderra" is worth more than ranking first for your own business name, which you'd win anyway.

This week

Run the site: search on your domain. Count what comes back against the number of pages you know you have.

If the number is badly wrong, or zero, open your robots.txt and check your homepage for a noindex tag before doing anything else. If the number looks about right, you've answered the question, and the work in front of you is ranking work rather than a hunt for something broken.

We do that check as part of an audit, and we'll run one for free if you'd rather have someone else's eyes on it. But the two-minute version is yours to do now, and it's the one that decides everything after it.