Why your website is not visible in Google: nine common reasons

The question usually sounds like this: the site exists, it looks good, it is finished — and it is not in Google. Nine times out of ten the reason is on the list below, and at least half of them can be fixed before you even think about content or links.

Start here: is the page in the index at all

The simplest check: search Google for `site:yourdomain.com`. If there are only a couple of results, or none, the problem is not your positions — you are not in the index, and every other kind of work is pointless for now.

The second check is the “Pages” report in Search Console. It states how many pages are indexed and why the rest were left out. That report answers most of the questions below.

Nine reasons

1. robots.txt is blocking. A block added during development survived the launch. One line, total absence from search.
2. A noindex tag stayed on the page. The same story: a temporary tag that became permanent. The page is not in the index and no other work helps.
3. The site is new. On a new domain it takes time before Google has anything to judge by. That is not a fault, it is a queue.
4. Pages have no text of their own. If all the content sits inside an image or appears only after scripts run, Google may see an empty page. The check: look at the page’s HTML source and find your heading in it.
5. Every page has the same title and description. “Home | Company” on ten pages means, to Google, ten identical pages.
6. The old site’s addresses return 404. The most painful and the most common. The new site went up on new addresses, the old ones were left without redirects — and visibility built over years vanished overnight.
7. Unusable or very slow on mobile. Google judges the mobile version. If the first content appears after three seconds, that affects both the position and whether anyone waits at all.
8. Pages compete with each other. Three pages for the same query means Google picks for you, and it usually picks the weakest.
9. The language setup is muddled. On a multilingual site without correct hreflang, Google may show the wrong language or treat the versions as duplicates.

What not to do before the check

Do not commission content or links until crawling is in order. Text on a page that is not indexed is money doing nothing. Links to a page carrying noindex are the same. The order is always the same: technique, then content, then links.

What takes a long time

Points 1, 2, 5 and 6 are usually a day’s work. Point 4 depends on how the site is built — sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes a rebuild. Point 7 can be deeper work when the slowness comes from the foundation of the site rather than from the images.

Going through these nine points is essentially a technical SEO audit — there the list is longer and ordered by importance. If it turns out the problem is in the foundation, when it is better to build a new website than to repair the old one is set out on the development page.