Why Is My Website Not Showing on Google? 8 Reasons and How to Check Each One

You search for your business name and your website is nowhere to be found. Before you assume something is badly broken, it helps to know that “not showing on Google” can mean three different things: the site is not in Google’s index at all, it is indexed but ranks too low to be seen, or it appears for the wrong searches. Each one has a different fix.

This guide covers the first problem, a site or page that is missing from Google, and how to tell it apart from the other two. It is based on Google’s own Search Console help pages (at the time of writing, October 2026), not on guesswork.

First, check that you are really missing

Google’s help page on missing pages makes a point many owners skip: “Many people assume that they are not on Google, when in fact their page simply appears low in Search results.” So start with a quick test.

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com, using your own domain. Google recommends turning off SafeSearch first, because it can filter results. For a single page, use site: followed by the full page address.

• Results appear: your site is in Google’s index. Not every page may be, but the site is not missing, so your problem is ranking rather than indexing (see the section near the end).
• No results at all: the site is not indexed. Work through the eight reasons below.

1. The site is new

A new site or page is not in Google’s index until Google has found and processed it. Google says the total time “can be anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks, typically, depending on many factors”, and advises allowing at least a week after submitting a sitemap or an indexing request before assuming there is a problem. If you launched last week, the honest answer may simply be to wait, as long as the steps below are in place.

2. WordPress is asking search engines to stay away

WordPress has a setting under Settings > Reading called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Since WordPress 5.3, ticking it adds a noindex,nofollow robots tag to your pages. It is often switched on while a site is built on a test copy, then forgotten at launch. Untick it, save, and check the page source to confirm the tag has gone. It is also one of the first things to check after a rebuild, which we cover in our guide to redesigning a website without losing your SEO.

3. A noindex tag or header on the page

A noindex rule can come from an SEO plugin’s per-page setting, a theme or the server. Google says that when it finds the rule, it “will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it”. The rule can be a meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and the header is easy to miss because it is not visible on the page. Search Console’s URL Inspection tool shows whether indexing is allowed, and Google’s advice is to search the page source or response headers for the word “noindex”.

4. robots.txt is blocking Google

The file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt tells crawlers which areas to stay out of. A rule such as Disallow: / under User-agent: * asks every crawler to stay out of the whole site. Search Console’s Page indexing report lists affected pages as “URL blocked by robots.txt”. One trap: if you want a page kept out of Google, do not block it in robots.txt and rely on noindex as well. Google explains that if it cannot crawl the page, it never sees the noindex rule.

5. Google cannot find your pages

Google finds pages by following links and reading sitemaps. Its checklist is short: submit a sitemap, which “tells Google exactly which pages you want crawled”; make sure people know about your site, because “Google discovers new sites from existing sites”; and make every page reachable “by following a chain of one or more links from your homepage”. Google also warns against links that need user interaction to appear. Many WordPress sites create a sitemap automatically, so check yours exists and submit it. Our beginner’s guide to Search Console shows how.

6. “Discovered” or “Crawled” but not indexed

In the Page indexing report you may see two confusing statuses. “Discovered – currently not indexed” means Google found the URL but has not crawled it yet. “Crawled – currently not indexed” means Google crawled the page but did not index it, and Google says it “may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling”. Neither is a penalty, and Google states plainly: “Don’t expect every URL on your site to be indexed.”

In practice, the useful response is to make the page worth indexing: clearly different from your other pages, genuinely useful, and linked from related pages on your site. Google’s help page points to its Search Essentials and SEO Starter Guide for this.

7. Duplicates, or a site move that went wrong

If one page can be reached at several addresses, such as http and https or with and without www, Google picks one as the canonical page and shows only that one. This is normal. A problem appears when a site has been restructured, moved to a new domain or switched to https. Google says pages that performed well before can rank poorly if the move had mistakes, and the fix is 301 redirects from the old addresses to the new ones.

8. A manual action or security issue

This is rarer but quick to rule out. Google tells site owners to check the Manual Actions and Security Issues reports in Search Console. A manual action “will lower your page ranking or remove it entirely from Search results”. If you recently bought or inherited the website, Google notes it may come with existing manual actions, and the history pages in those reports will show them. If you are not sure who controls your site and its accounts, our domain, hosting and login checklist is a good place to start.

If you are indexed but still not found

If site: returns your pages but a search such as “yoga studio Ubud” does not show you, you do not have an indexing problem. Ranking depends on competition, the quality of your content and, for local searches, your Google Business Profile. Our posts on how long SEO takes, a technical SEO checklist and the Google Business Profile guide cover those next steps.

A simple order to work through

1. Search site:yourdomain.com with SafeSearch off.
2. In WordPress, check that Settings > Reading is not set to discourage search engines.
3. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /.
4. View the page source, or use URL Inspection, and look for “noindex”.
5. In Search Console, submit your sitemap and request indexing for your homepage.
6. Wait at least a week, then open the Page indexing report to see Google’s stated reason.
7. Check the Manual Actions and Security Issues reports.

SodraTech helps small businesses with SEO, including the technical checks above. If you have worked through the list and your site is still missing, tell us about your business and we will take a look.