Why is my website not showing up on Google? The checks to run first

Six reasons your site disappears

Six problems cover the usual cases. You can confirm four of them in Search Console within minutes. The other two, thin content and competition, take weeks of work to fix.

Run the checks in the order of the table. Rewriting copy won't help while a noindex tag sits in your template.

Your site is not indexed

Google can only show pages it has stored in its index, and new sites or pages with few links aren't there yet. Google's own guide to how Search works states that it "doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page", even when the page follows its rules.

Quick check with a site: search

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If nothing comes back, Google has no pages from your domain. A short list means only part of the site made it in. Treat the result count as a rough estimate.

Exact check with URL Inspection

Paste a full URL into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. It tells you whether the URL is on Google and why it isn't. To see the whole site at once, open the Page indexing report, which groups unindexed URLs by reason.

Robots.txt blocks Google

One line in robots.txt, Disallow: /, stops Googlebot from crawling your whole site. The line comes over from a staging site at launch and nobody removes it. WordPress has a similar switch under Settings > Reading, a box labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site."

A blocked page can still turn up in results. Google's introduction to robots.txt says the file "is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google." When other sites link to a blocked page, Google can index the URL with almost no snippet. To check, open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line.

Noindex tags hide pages

Yes, a noindex tag hides a page. Google's documentation on noindex says Google drops the page entirely "regardless of whether other sites link to it." The rule appears as a meta tag in the page's head or an X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. The header version doesn't show in the page source, so developers miss it.

Google has to crawl a page to see that the tag is gone, so a robots.txt block on the same URL keeps the old noindex in force. Check both.

Manual actions from Google

A manual action is a penalty that a human reviewer at Google applies when a site breaks Google's spam policies. It can remove single pages or the whole domain. Open Security & Manual Actions in Search Console. An empty report means you don't have a penalty.

If you find one, the report names the problem and the affected pages. Paid links and scraped content are common triggers. Fix every listed page, then file a reconsideration request that explains what you changed.

Content is too thin

Google can crawl a page and still decide it isn't worth indexing. Its guide to how Search works lists low content quality first among common indexing problems. In Search Console, these pages show up as "Crawled - currently not indexed."

Thin pages look alike. Think of product pages with the maker's copied description, or city pages where only the place name changes. Merge the near-duplicates into one stronger page. Then add what only your business knows, such as real prices or photos of your own work.

Competition outranks you

If your page is indexed but ranks on page 3, you have a ranking problem, and other pages are winning that search. Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, found that 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google. He blamed missing backlinks and topics nobody searches for. A third cause on his list is pages that don't match what the searcher wants.

Search your target phrase and open the top five results. What do they cover that you don't? Then search your exact business name. If you can't find yourself even there, the problem is indexing, so go back to the first checks.

Forcing a Google recrawl

Once the problem is fixed, you can request a recrawl from Google.

1. Remove the block first, whether it's a noindex tag or a robots.txt rule.
2. Open URL Inspection and click Test live URL to confirm Google can index the page now.
3. Click Request indexing.
4. For more than a handful of URLs, resubmit your XML sitemap in the Sitemaps report.

Google's recrawl documentation warns that crawling takes "a few days to a few weeks." Individual requests have a daily quota, and asking again for the same URL won't speed it up.

Tracking visibility in Search Console

Search Console shows whether a fix worked within two or three weeks. In the Performance report, watch impressions before clicks. Rising impressions mean Google has started showing your pages, even if they rank too low to get clicks yet.

Check the Page indexing report every week after a fix. You want the indexed count to go up and the reason you fixed to shrink. If both have moved, you've answered "why is my website not showing up on Google" with data, and you can turn to rankings.