Your website not showing up on Google is almost like your house not showing up on a map — it might be there, but there’s no way for people to find it without you telling them where to look.
Which is fine if you’re hosting a SuperBowl party, but not great if your business relies on people coming to your website. Which most businesses do, otherwise, why have a website to begin with?
If you have a business website but can’t get it to appear in Google search results, it’s critical to know how to fix it. Sometimes it’s an easy fix, like removing a noindex tag. Other times, it might be an uphill climb, like creating a large library of high-quality content.
Either way, we’re here to help you figure out why your website isn’t showing up on Google, and teach you how to fix it.
Tip: before troubleshooting your website, you need access to Google Search Console (GSC). It’s a free service provided by Google that allows you to see important information about your website. See their Google Search Console setup guide for more information.
Bonus — if we built your website, this has been set up for you. Just send us an email if you need access.
How Google Indexing Works
Google keeps an index of available web pages that it can show in search results. This is essentially a huge library of all the websites Google knows of, their individual pages, and the content on them. If your website is not in this index, it will not appear in search results.
Keep in mind that there are over 1 billion websites in existence. Not all of them are active, and likely not all of them are indexed, but the size of Google’s index is still massive. There are several steps that a page goes through before being added to the index:
- Discovery: When Google finds a new page, it has been discovered. This can happen when Google’s bots follow a link to a new page, or if you submit them via GSC.
- Crawling: Once a page is discovered, Google’s bots will try to visit it to see what content is on it. This includes rendering HTML and JavaScript (or other code) to see what your page looks like to internet users.
- Indexing: If Google successfully crawls a page, it tries to understand what it’s about using content tags and attributes on the page. It may or may not add the page to the index.
- Serving: If Google decides an indexed page has the most relevant answer for a search query, it will be served as a result for that query.
This is a simplified overview of how Google’s algorithm works, but it’s important to know these terms in order to decipher the indexing report in Google Search Console:
How Can You See if a Website is Indexed?
The easiest way to see if your website is indexed is to use the site search operator on Google. Simply type site: into Google’s search bar, followed by your website’s URL. Make sure there are no spaces between the colon and your URL.
When you hit search, Google will return all the pages on your site that are indexed. You can also check specific pages with the site operator. If a page is not in Google’s index, you’ll see something like this:
You might have noticed that both these screenshots recommend trying Google Search Console for indexing information. Using GSC will tell you if pages are indexed, but also the reason they aren’t indexed.
Here’s where to look:
- Login to your Google Search Console account
- Copy the URL you want to request indexing for into the search box at the top of the screen and press Enter
The next screen will tell you whether that page is indexed, and if not, the reason why. We’ll walk through some of the reasons why in later sections of this blog post.
How Long Before a Web Page Gets Indexed on Google?
Some pages will get indexed within a couple hours; some won’t get indexed at all. Unfortunately, there is no way to predict how long it will take.
However, there is one step you can take to speed up the process: putting in an indexing request in Google Search Console.
Here’s how you do it:
- Login to your Google Search Console account
- Copy the URL you want to request indexing for into the search box at the top of the screen and press Enter
- On the right side of the next screen, click Request Indexing
This tells Google exactly where your new page is and adds the URL to a priority crawl list. In our experience, most pages take less than 24 hours to be indexed after we submit a request. If not, there’s likely something else going on that’s preventing a page from being indexed.
Other Ways to Speed Up Indexing a New Page
While submitting an index request is the fastest way to have a page indexed, there are other tactics you can use.
Google routinely crawls websites to see if anything has changed, and will often discover new pages and add them to the index on its own. You can help this process by having a solid internal linking structure between new and old pages — this allows Google’s bots to find your content more easily.
If you’ve updated several pages or are relaunching your entire website, you should submit your sitemap to Google. This is similar to an index request, but it asks Google to recrawl your entire website instead of individual pages.
Here’s how you do it:
- Login to your Google Search Console account
- On the left side, click Sitemaps
- Add the URL for your website’s sitemap and click Submit
If you’re not sure where your sitemap is, adding “sitemap.xml” to your homepage URL will work most of the time. Another common version is “sitemap_index.xml,” which you’ll see on our website: https://hustlefish.com/sitemap_index.xml.
Technical Reasons Your Website is Not Showing Up on Google
If your pages aren’t showing up on Google, there might be technical reasons that need to be fixed before you can be indexed.
Common reasons why your website may not appear:
- Google hasn’t indexed the website yet
- Blocked by robots.txt or meta noindex tags
- It’s not mobile friendly
- Poor website structure
- Penalized for violating Google’s guidelines
We’ll walk you through how to figure out if one of these issues is affecting your website, and how to fix it.
Google Hasn’t Indexed Your Website Yet
This issue is pretty straightforward, but usually only affects new websites. If you’ve recently launched your website, there’s a good chance Google just hasn’t discovered it yet.
If you want to check this, we discussed how you can see if a website is indexed in an earlier section.
To fix this, submit your sitemap through GSC and wait a few days. If your website is indexed, great! If not, there’s likely something else going on.
Your Website is Blocked by noindex Meta Tags or robots.txt
There are a few ways website owners have control over how they appear in search results. Two of these tools are known as noindex tags and robots.txt files.
noindex Meta Tags
A noindex meta tag is HTML on your website that tells search engines not to index your page. While there are plenty of good reasons to use them, sometimes they are used incorrectly or inadvertently.
If a page can’t be indexed because of this tag, your GSC will show this:
You can also use browser extensions to tell you whether a page has a noindex tag. Our favorite is the SEO Pro Extension by MarketingSyrup:
Depending on the content management system (CMS) you use, removing a noindex tag might be pretty simple. For example, in WordPress, the Yoast plugin lets you choose whether or not a page should be indexed or not:
Other CMS are not as user friendly, and might require editing the HTML on your site directly. If you’re running into this issue and need help, our team would be happy to help you figure it out. Just drop us a line and let us know what pages you’re having trouble with.
Robots.txt
This is a text file that tells search engines (including Google) how their crawlers are allowed to access your website. It is not recommended you use this file to block individual pages from search results, and it’s less common than a noindex tag. But it’s still important to check and make sure yours hasn’t been set up incorrectly.
To find yours, simply append robots.txt to the end of your homepage URL, like this: https://hustlefish.com/robots.txt. You’ll likely see something similar to ours:
This setup allows all kinds of bots to crawl our website.
If you have pages listed after the disallow function in your robots.txt, that might be what’s preventing a page from being indexed. For example:
With this setup, Nike is blocking certain areas of their site from being crawled, such as member areas and checkout pages.
If a page you want indexed is disallowed, you’ll need to update your robots.txt to remove it.
Poor Website Structure
When Google’s bots crawl your website, they rely on internal links to guide them from one page to another. If they’re unable to follow links to a page — or there are too many links to get there — the bots may not find all of your pages, and therefore be unable to index them.
This is a more complicated problem that can take a lot of work to fix. These questions can help you determine if site structure is at fault:
- How many clicks does it take to reach a page from the homepage? If it takes more than 3-4 clicks to reach a page, it may not be indexed.
- Are any internal links broken? If you have broken links between pages, it may be preventing an accurate crawl of your website.
- Do you have any orphaned pages? An orphan is a page that isn’t linked to any other part of your website. If this happens, crawlers will not be able to find the orphan pages until they are connected to the rest of the site.
- Are there any redirect chains or loops? If you’ve redirected pages, make sure there’s only one redirect between the initial page and the final destination. If you have more than one redirect in a sequence (a chain) or a redirect that sends users in circles (a loop), crawlers might get confused and not index your page.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these are common issues we see, and they’re some of the easiest ones to fix.
Penalized for Violating Google’s Guidelines
Google has guidelines in place that prevent websites from unfairly gaming the algorithm to make their site rank higher. If websites violate these guidelines, they may receive a manual penalty, which removes the site from Google’s search results.
This is not common, but it’s worth mentioning. It’s also easy to check for.
In Google Search Console, at the bottom of the left-hand menu is Manual Actions. If you open this page, it will tell you whether or not Google has taken a manual action against your site. If there is a manual action listed, Google will give you steps to have the penalty removed. Once you have remedied the issues listed, you can request a review of your website.
Website Still Not Showing Up in Google Search Results? Check Your Content
Content issues are often harder to figure out than technical ones, since content can be much more subjective.
But first, let’s revisit a couple definitions:
- If your site is indexed, it is capable of being shown as a result for search queries. This does not guarantee it will rank well, it only guarantees the possibility of ranking.
- Ranking in search results means your website is indexed and Google has determined it is relevant to a specific search query. The higher your ranking, the more people will visit your website from a search engine.
Most of the things preventing your site from being indexed are similar to reasons you aren’t ranking well. But for the purpose of this blog, we will focus more on reasons you aren’t being indexed.
Thin or Low-Quality Content
Google states that search engines should “deliver the most relevant and reliable information available.”
Their goal is to provide search users with a page that answers their entire query without needing to navigate to another page, or return to search results. To do this, they prioritize web pages with in-depth, useful information.
If the page you’re trying to have indexed is thin, or doesn’t have high-quality content or insights to offer, Google may not add it to the index. This includes pages with:
- Very few words (generally less than 300)
- Shallow content that doesn’t offer value to readers
- Content that’s irrelevant to the topic of the page or overall website
If you have pages that meet this description, focus on creating in-depth content that users will find helpful.
Duplicate Content
Similar to preferring in-depth and helpful content, Google requires your pages to be unique. This prevents people from plagiarizing your content and benefitting from your work, but it also prevents you from spamming search results by creating more than one page with the same content.
Where most websites run into trouble, however, is not understanding everything that counts as duplicate content.
For example, if we didn’t tell it otherwise, Google would see www.hustlefish.com and hustlefish.com as two different pages — even though they’re both our homepage. It might treat them as duplicate content, just because one URL uses www, and the other does not.
To fix this issue, we can use what is called a canonical tag. Depending on your CMS, you can often do this with a plugin or using your site settings. We prefer to use the Yoast plugin, which gives us the ability to designate a canonical:
You can also update your site’s HTML, or use a variety of plugins to change your canonical tags.
Duplicate Titles or Meta Descriptions
We’ve seen this issue most often for clients with ecommerce sites, but it can happen anywhere. Especially if you duplicate pages and update them, rather than creating new ones when adding to your website.
When your title tags or meta descriptions are the same, it can confuse Google’s crawlers and make it difficult for them to figure out what each page is about. If it can’t decide, it might opt to skip indexing them altogether.
While this is an easy thing to fix, it can be tedious to figure out which pages are affected on your site. Our way to do this is using Semrush’s Site Audit tool:
Content Hidden Behind Login Walls
Google’s crawlers can only see pages that are publicly accessible. If your website requires a login or a paywall in order to see content, it likely won’t be indexed.
If you can, consider keeping your important content accessible. If you have to keep a login active, consider offering a preview of the content so Google can still crawl and index the page.
Want an Expert’s Opinion on Why You Aren’t Showing Up on Google?
Running a business means you often wear a lot of hats — and optimizing your website isn’t always one you have time for.
If you’ve gotten this far and are still having issues with getting your website indexed by Google, our team is here to help. Between our web developers and SEO specialist, we can make sure your website has its best chance at getting indexed and ranking well.