Why your website is not showing on Google

When a business says its website is not on Google, it usually means one of two different things, and they have different fixes. Either Google has not put the site in its index at all, or the site is in the index and does not appear for the searches that matter. The first is nearly always a technical fault you can find in an afternoon. The second is a ranking problem, and it takes months.

So the first job is to find out which one you have.

The one-minute check

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google, using your own domain. If pages come back, the site is indexed and your problem is ranking — skip to the last two sections. If nothing comes back, Google does not have the site, and the rest of this list is for you.

Then search for your business name. A new business often appears for its own name within days, and for something like "web designer in Delhi" not for months, if ever. That gap is normal. It is not a fault, and nothing on this list will close it.

Set up Search Console first

Every fix below starts here. Google Search Console is free, it is Google's own report on your site, and without it you are guessing. Add your domain, verify it with a DNS record your domain provider can add in a few minutes, and give it a day or two to collect data.

The tool you will use most is URL Inspection. Paste in the address of a page and it tells you whether that page is on Google and, if not, why. Most of the causes below appear there by name.

The causes, in the order worth checking

The site is new. A domain nothing links to can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks to be crawled. Submitting a sitemap and requesting indexing for the homepage help, and so does a link from anything Google already knows — your Business Profile, a directory listing, a social profile. Paying someone to "submit your site to Google" buys exactly this, which you can do yourself.

A noindex left switched on. One of the most common causes, and the most embarrassing. Sites are built with indexing turned off so the half-finished version is not found, and nobody turns it back on at launch. In WordPress it is a checkbox under Settings, then Reading, labelled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". On any site, open the page source and search it for the word noindex.

robots.txt blocking everything. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it says Disallow: / under User-agent: *, the whole site is closed to every search engine. Same origin as the noindex: a development setting that survived launch.

No sitemap, or the wrong one. A sitemap is the list of pages you want found. Submit it in Search Console and compare the number of pages it reports with the number you actually have. If it lists http addresses when the site runs on https, or www when the site does not use it, Google is being sent to pages that only redirect.

Pages Google found and chose not to index. Search Console calls these "Discovered – currently not indexed" and "Crawled – currently not indexed". Neither is an error. It is Google saying the page does not look worth including yet. Thin pages, pages that repeat another page, and pages nothing links to end up here. The fix is to make the page genuinely useful and link to it from pages that are already indexed: the homepage, a service page, an article people read.

Old pages still showing, new ones missing. After a redesign, Google can keep showing addresses that no longer exist for weeks while it slowly finds their replacements. We went through exactly this with our own site in September: retired pages were still in the index, and several new ones had not been picked up. Redirect every old address to its closest new page, resubmit the sitemap, and use the Removals tool in Search Console for anything that should disappear sooner. A removal lasts about six months. The redirect is what makes it permanent.

A security issue or manual action. Rare, but look at the Security and Manual Actions section in Search Console. If a hacked page or a penalty is listed there, nothing else on this list matters until it is resolved.

Most of these are settings, not strategy. They take minutes to fix and weeks to be noticed.

If you are on Google but nobody finds you

That is a different problem. It needs a page for each thing you want to be found for, written for the person searching, on a site that is fast on a phone — most of what local search actually rewards. If you want to appear on the map, your Google Business Profile carries much of the weight, and verifying it is a separate process from getting the website indexed.

Ranking is slow and there is no switch for it. Be wary of anyone who says there is.

What you should not pay for

Almost everything above is free, and most of it is an afternoon's work for anyone comfortable with a settings page. If you are quoted a monthly fee for "Google indexing" or "search engine submission", it is these steps, and they are done once.

What is worth paying for comes after: pages that deserve to rank, and a site built so they can. Once it is live, someone should open Search Console every month and look — the same routine checks that keep a site healthy after launch.