Search4 min read

Why Your Site Is Not in Google Yet

New sites take time, but most indexing problems are self-inflicted. The checks to run in order, from the ones that take a minute to the ones that take weeks.

A hand reaching into a library card catalog

Your site went live three weeks ago and searching your business name finds nothing. Usually this is one of about six things, and they are worth checking in order of how quickly you can rule them out.

First, check properly

Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. That asks Google which of your pages it knows about.

Results appear: you are indexed. Your problem is ranking, which is a different article.
Nothing appears: Google does not have your pages. Keep reading.
Some pages appear: partial indexing. Also keep reading, but skip to the section on individual pages.

Cause one: it has been three weeks

New sites take time. A brand new domain with no links pointing at it can take days to weeks to appear, and longer to rank for anything competitive.

If the site is under two weeks old and you have done the things below, wait. Impatience here leads people to change things that were fine.

Cause two: the site is telling Google to stay away

This is the most common real cause, and it is almost always a leftover from development.

Check your robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / you are blocking everything. That line belongs on a staging site and follows the site to production more often than anyone would like to admit.

Check for a noindex tag. View the page source and search for “noindex.” A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag tells search engines to leave the page out. Many content systems have a “discourage search engines” checkbox that does exactly this, and it stays ticked after launch.

Check for password protection. A staging password left on, or an access restriction, and nothing gets crawled.

These three account for most cases where a site simply never appears.

Cause three: nothing points at your site

Search engines find pages by following links. A brand new domain with no links anywhere is genuinely hard to discover.

Fix it directly:

Set up Google Search Console, verify the domain, and submit your sitemap. This is the single most useful thing you can do and it takes fifteen minutes.
Make sure your Google Business Profile links to the site.
Link from your social profiles.
If you have any legitimate industry directory or association listings, link from those.

You do not need to buy links. You need a handful of real ones so the site is discoverable at all.

Cause four: no sitemap, or a broken one

Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap-index.xml. You should see a list of your pages.

If it is missing, most content systems can generate one. If it lists pages that no longer exist, or lists the staging domain instead of the live one, fix that. A sitemap pointing at the wrong domain is a surprisingly common launch mistake.

Then submit it in Search Console.

Cause five: the pages are not reachable

Google follows links. If a page is only reachable through a search box on your own site, or sits four clicks deep behind a filter, it may not be found.

Every page you care about should be reachable from your homepage in two or three clicks through ordinary links. Navigation, a services index, a locations index. Not a dropdown that only exists in JavaScript, and not a footer link buried under thirty others.

Cause six: individual pages excluded

If most of the site is indexed and a few pages are not, open Search Console and use the URL inspection tool on one of them. It will tell you what it found, and the reason is usually one of these:

Crawled, currently not indexed. Google saw it and decided it was not worth including. Usually a thin page. Add something worth reading or remove the page.
Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical. Two of your pages say roughly the same thing. Pick one.
Blocked by robots.txt. Same as above, but for a directory.
Excluded by noindex tag. Same as above, on a page level.

After the site is fixed

Ranking is a separate problem from indexing, and the gap between them frustrates people.

Being in the index means you are eligible. Ranking means you are chosen, and that takes a site that answers a real question better than the ones already there, plus time. For a local business, your Google Business Profile usually starts producing before your website does, sometimes by months.