If your site does not appear on Google, it is almost always one of nine things. Here is how to find out which one in about ten minutes, and how to fix it.
If your website is not showing up on Google, check this first: search site:yourdomain.com. If results appear, your site is indexed and the real problem is ranking, not indexing. If nothing appears, Google has not indexed you -- the usual causes are a site that is too new, a noindex tag or robots.txt rule left over from development, no internal links to the page, or no sitemap submitted in Search Console.
There are two completely different problems hiding behind this question, and the fix for one does nothing for the other. Either Google does not know your page exists, or Google knows and has decided other pages deserve the spot. Thirty seconds of checking tells you which one you have.
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. This lists every page Google has indexed from your site.
If you see pages listed, you are indexed. Skip to the ranking half of this article. If you see nothing at all, you have an indexing problem, and the next six sections are yours.
A brand new domain can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to appear. There is no button that skips this and nobody can sell you one.
What you can do is speed up discovery: submit your sitemap in Google Search Console, and get at least one link pointing at your site from a page Google already crawls often. Crawlers follow links, so a site with zero inbound links is a site Google has no path to.
This is the most common cause of a site that mysteriously never appears. Many site builders and staging setups add a meta robots noindex tag, and it quietly survives the launch.
Check it: view the page source and search for noindex. If it is there, remove it. In WordPress, look for the discourage search engines checkbox in the reading settings.
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine to stay out of the entire site.
Worth knowing: robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing. A blocked page can still show up as a bare URL with no description, which looks even worse than not appearing at all.
Google finds pages by following links. A page that nothing links to -- no menu, no footer, no article -- is effectively invisible even if it is technically live.
Every page worth ranking should be reachable from your homepage in three clicks or fewer.
A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the real version of a page. If every page on your site carries a canonical pointing at your homepage -- a surprisingly common bug in single-page apps and some templates -- you are telling Google that none of your other pages deserve their own listing.
Check the page source for link rel=canonical and confirm it matches the URL you are actually on.
Google can render JavaScript, but it does so on a delay and not always completely. If the useful text on your page only exists after a script runs, expect slower indexing and weaker results.
Test it: view the raw page source, not the inspector. If your headline and body text are not in there, crawlers may not see them on the first pass.
If site: shows your pages, this is your real situation. Position 50 and not existing feel identical from the outside, because nobody scrolls to page five.
The fix is not technical. It is relevance and authority: pages that answer a specific question better than the ones currently ranking, and links from other sites telling Google you are worth trusting. Start with our guide to SEO for small businesses.
A new site chasing a two-word head term competes against pages with thousands of links and years of history. You will lose that fight for a long time.
Go narrower instead. Five-word questions have less competition and better buyers behind them. Ranking first for a question a hundred people ask beats ranking fiftieth for one a hundred thousand ask.
Links remain one of the strongest signals Google has. A site with zero external links has nothing vouching for it, so it sits behind sites that do.
You do not need hundreds. A handful of relevant, permanent links makes a real difference early on -- see how to get backlinks for free, and for the fastest permanent option, a one-time listing on a pixel wall like The Global Wall gives you a link that never expires.
Run site:yourdomain.com. Check the page source for noindex. Read your robots.txt. Confirm the canonical matches the page. Make sure the page is linked from somewhere. Submit your sitemap in Search Console. Get one real link.
If all seven are clean and you are still invisible after a few weeks, you do not have an indexing problem. You have a competition problem, and that is a content and links project, not a settings fix.
Usually between a few days and four weeks. Submitting a sitemap in Google Search Console and earning at least one inbound link from a page Google already crawls speeds it up considerably.
Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. Every page listed is indexed. If nothing appears, Google has not indexed your site, and the cause is usually a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, or a site too new and too unlinked to have been found.
Because you are indexed but not competitive. Your brand name has almost no competition, so you win it by default. Keywords have competition, and winning those takes relevant content and links.
No. Google Ads buys ad placement, not indexing or organic ranking. Anyone selling guaranteed indexing or a guaranteed first position is selling something they cannot deliver.
Buy permanent pixel space on The Global Wall