Why is my website not showing on Google?

The five-second diagnostic

site:yoursite.com

Type that into Google. It lists what Google has indexed from your domain.

• Nothing: not indexed. Go to the next section. This is usually fixable and often a single line.
• Some pages, not the one you want: that page specifically is blocked, canonicalised elsewhere, or considered a duplicate.
• Everything is there: you are indexed and not ranking. Skip to the last section.

If you are not indexed

Causes, in rough order of frequency:

1. A noindex tag. Check the HTML for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> and the headers for X-Robots-Tag. Staging sites are built with these and they travel to production more often than anyone admits.
2. robots.txt blocking. Fetch yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /. Note that robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing — a blocked page can still appear as a bare URL, which confuses the diagnosis.
3. The site is too new. Discovery takes days to weeks for a brand new domain with no inbound links. Submit the sitemap in Search Console to speed it up.
4. No links anywhere. Google finds sites by following links. A site nothing links to, with no sitemap submitted, may simply never have been found.
5. Content requires JavaScript. Google renders it, but on a delay and not always. A client-rendered site indexes slowly and incompletely.
6. A manual action. Rare, but check Search Console. It will tell you explicitly.

If specific pages are missing

• Canonical pointing elsewhere. If the page declares another URL as canonical, Google indexes that one instead. Check the tag on the actual page.
• Treated as duplicate. Near-identical pages get consolidated. Location or variant pages that differ only by a place name are the usual culprits.
• Orphaned. No internal links point to it, so nothing leads Google there.
• Thin. A page with very little unique content may be crawled and left out deliberately.

If you are indexed but invisible

This is not a fault — it is competition, and it is a slower problem. Realistic first steps:

• Check whether you rank for your own brand name. If not, something is badly wrong. If yes, the mechanics are fine.
• Look at what actually ranks for your target query and compare honestly. Usually the answer is that those pages are more specific, more thorough, or from established sources.
• Target narrower queries first. "Emergency plumber Bristol Sunday" is winnable; "plumber" is not.
• Fix the title and description so the page states plainly what it answers.
• Then earn links, which is the slow part and the part that cannot be skipped.