Website not showing up on Google: the four reasons
If your website is not showing up on Google, it is almost always one of four things: Google has not found the page yet, the page is there but blocked, the page exists but nothing on it matches what people type, or the page is competing with another page on your own site. Each one has a different fix, and you can work out which is yours in about ten minutes.
First, check whether Google has the page at all
Search Google for site: followed by your web address, with no space, like site:yourbusiness.co.uk. What comes back is every page Google is holding for you.
If nothing comes back, Google does not have your site yet and none of the other reasons matter. If your pages are there but the one you care about is missing, the problem is that page rather than the site.
Reason one: Google has not found it yet
A brand new site or a brand new page has to be discovered before it can rank. Google finds pages by following links and by reading your sitemap, so a page nothing links to and no sitemap lists can sit there for weeks.
The fix is to submit the site in Google Search Console, make sure your sitemap is listed there, and link to the new page from a page Google already has. That is normally a few days rather than a few months.
Reason two: the page is blocked
A page can be perfectly good and still be told not to appear. Two settings do this: a line in the robots.txt file that tells crawlers to stay out, and a noindex tag on the page itself.
Both get switched on during a build and are supposed to come off at launch. When a whole site vanishes overnight, this is usually why, and it is a five minute fix once somebody looks.
Finding out which of the four it is takes about ten minutes. Fixing the fourth one properly is what our SEO work does, starting with the research that shows exactly what people near you are typing.
Reason three: nothing on the page matches what people type
This is the common one. The page exists, Google has it, and it simply is not what anybody searched for.
It happens when a site has one Services page covering eight things instead of eight pages covering one thing each. Google has nothing specific to show, so it shows somebody else.
The fix is a page for each thing you sell and each place you cover, written in the words your customers use rather than the trade terms you use. That starts with finding out what those words are, with real search volumes, before anybody writes anything.
Reason four: your pages are competing with each other
If three pages on your site all half answer the same question, Google has to choose between them and often picks none of them.
The fix is to decide which page owns that question, make it the fullest answer on the site, and point the other two at it. One question, one page.
What to do about each one, in order
Start with the blocking, because it costs nothing and takes minutes. Open your robots.txt by typing your address followed by /robots.txt, and look for a line saying Disallow with a slash after it.
Then set up Google Search Console if you have not already. It is free, it tells you which of your pages Google is holding, and it is where you submit your sitemap so new pages get found quickly.
Then look at your page list against the things you sell. If you sell eight things and have one Services page, that is the job, and it is the one that changes your position rather than just your presence.
That fourth step is the one we do. SV Autos came to us with the same gap and now has eleven service pages and twenty five town pages, with 155 phrases on page one of Google and 82 of them in the top three, measured in Search Console.
How long it takes once it is fixed
Getting found at all can happen within days once the blocking is off and the sitemap is in. Moving up the results for a phrase people actually search is three to six months of work, and longer where a lot of businesses want the same phrase.
That gap trips people up. Appearing and ranking are two different jobs, and only the first one is quick.
Before you ask
How do I check if Google has my website?
Search for site: followed by your address, with no space between them. Everything Google is holding for your site comes back. If the list is empty, Google has not indexed you yet.
How long after a new website goes live before it shows up?
Usually a few days to a couple of weeks, once the site is submitted in Google Search Console and your sitemap is listed there. Without that it can take considerably longer, because Google has to stumble across you.
My website not showing up on Google started suddenly. What happened?
A site that disappears overnight has almost always been blocked rather than penalised. Check for a noindex tag on the pages and a disallow line in robots.txt, which are the two switches flipped during building that sometimes get left on after a change.
Can I fix this myself?
The blocking and the sitemap are quick, and this page tells you how. The third and fourth reasons are the ones that decide whether you rank rather than just appear, and that is the work we do: the research into what people near you actually type, then a page for each of it.