Last modified August 18, 2021
If you have already spent so much time and investment in creating a quality website, but the traffic is so little to no. Maybe you need to improve your SEO skills. However, there could be several reasons why your site is not showing up on Google. Here are the explanations and solutions.
How to check if your website is indexed on Google?
But, how do you confirm that your site is not indexed by Google?
Well, to confirm and check if you have this problem, you need to open your browser and search for your domain by following these simple steps;
- Go to Google
- In the search bar, type: site: www.mysite.com
- The search result will display all the pages on your website already indexed by Google.
If you have more than 50 pages but the Google search result only shows 20 pages, it means that you are missing at least 30 pages that have not yet been indexed by Google.
Reasons why your website is not showing up or indexed on Google
Now we’ll get into the nitty gritty issues of why Google isn’t indexing your website (yet). Here are the most common problems:
1. This is a new website
Your website has not yet been indexed by Google because it is a new site. This is the most common case for recently launched websites. So don’t worry too much, because in reality it takes time and that’s perfectly normal.
It can take a week or more for a search engine’s search results to update. This is because your website is new and (usually) has no inbound links.
What to do :
If your site is new and this problem is similar to the one you are currently experiencing, you should sign up for Google Search Console and create an account there.
When you sign up, you can ask Google to crawl your URLs again and tell them the URL for your sitemap.xml. However, due to the large number of requests, this feature does not always work out of the box (especially if your site is new or large).
What you need to know is that Google does not index all submitted URLs, and it cannot predict or guarantee when or if submitted URLs will appear in its index. However, if your new website is crawled, it usually takes a week or two before it is indexed.
2. Google does not consider your site “trustworthy” or “relevant” to the keyword
Earning trust is key to gaining market share in search. Arguably the entire search engine optimization (SEO) industry exists for this purpose. It’s extremely common for someone to create a website for a business, only for Google to bury it on page 9 of search results or higher, or even not show it at all.
- But put yourself in Google’s shoes and ask yourself these questions;
- Why should Google show your site to the user?
- Is there something truly unique about your business or website?
Is there any reason why Google should immediately trust you to the point that your site should outrank sites that have been around for months or years?
What to do :
How to build trust and be relevant? This is one of the most controversial topics in SEO, with two opposing camps vehemently defending their point of view.
- White Hat SEO:
White Hat SEOs’ approach is to build trust by providing value to searchers. This is how Google wants us to run our websites: conduct research to identify topics that are relevant to our business and useful to searchers, and then create unique and useful content around those topics.
Google notices when people seem to find what they’re looking for on your website, or when they have to visit other websites to find what they’re looking for. Additionally, if you create unique resources that add value to people’s lives, other websites will undoubtedly link to them. This is called “link building” or “earning links”.
By meeting search intent and getting links from other websites, you show the search engine that you can be trusted and should show your website as a result when people search for topics related to your web pages.
- Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO specialists manipulate trust by obtaining links to their websites through various methods. These techniques have the advantage of requiring less effort and working faster than white hat SEO methods. The downside is that Google engineers are usually pretty quick to spot the methods they use, making them less than ideal long-term business tactics.
3. In your robots.txt file, you have blocked the Googlebot crawler
Your robots.txt file tells robots which pages on your site they can and cannot crawl. If you unintentionally block a page or folder containing an important resource, Google is unlikely to index your site.
What to do :
Not all pages in this list will be indexed. Examine your robots.txt file to see if you’ve accidentally blocked a page that you want to appear on Google. This article won’t go into detail about the robots.txt file, but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. If you want to do it yourself, read this article on the subject by Cognitive SEO.
4. You have set a page or the entire site to “noindex”, checked the “prevent search engines from indexing this site” box in WordPress, or made another page the canonical version
A “noindex” directive tells search engines not to include a page in their index. If you do this, it stands to reason that your page will not appear on Google.
By going to the page and viewing the source code. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a developer to do this. This is the most effective way to determine if your page is “noindexed”. Once you are on the code page, use CTRL+F or CMD+F to search for the word “noindex”. If nothing appears, your page has not been noindexed.
If you are using the popular Yoast SEO plugin in a WordPress site, you need to check if the page has been deindexed there. Go to the Yoast plugin and select the gear icon on the left.
What to do :
Verify that the “Allow search engines to display the page in search results” option is set to “yes”. Also check that the “canonical URL” does not correspond to another page. A “rel=canonical” tells the search engine that this is not the original content and should not be indexed, instead of indexing the “canonical” URL.
5. You were penalized and Google deindexed your website
If your website was listed in the search results but is no longer there, confirm it by searching site:yourdomain.com. If nothing appears, you may have a problem.
If you haven’t already done so, check your domain in Google Search Console and see if you receive a notification about a manual penalty. Google will usually notify you if your website has been penalized, as well as the reason for the penalty. It also allows you to request that the site be re-examined after you have fixed the offending issues.
What to do :
Penalties are usually imposed when a website does something wrong, such as spamming links, scraping content, or hacking. Google usually lifts the penalty once you’ve fixed the problem, but if it’s a major problem, like link spam, you may have a lot of work ahead of you.
So do your best to fix the problem and let Google take care of the rest!
6. Your website has a technical problem that prevents Google from crawling and indexing it
You won’t be able to do this yourself unless you have prior experience with technical SEO. It’s too easy, especially when it comes to e-commerce SEO, to create a site that works for users but is inaccessible to search engine crawlers. If Googlebot cannot understand your content, it will not be able to serve it.
What to do :
If you think this is a problem with your site, contact a web developer or technical SEO specialist to check it for you.
Conclusion
So, these 6 problems are the general problems that usually happen all the time. If your site does not appear in Google. My suggestion is to rule out all of these diagnostics first and see if you can ultimately resolve them. However, if you are not too technical, you can ask a professional to do it for you. I hope these tips help you!