My Site Isn't Showing Up on Google: Which Case Is Yours?

You typed your company’s name into Google. You scrolled to the bottom of the page. You tried again, this time on your phone. The site was not there.

The urge is to change everything at once. Rewrite the copy, request indexing ten times, text whoever built the site. Hold off for five minutes.

The phrase “my site isn’t showing up on Google” covers very different situations. The site that went live last week. The site hidden by a box someone checked in the settings. The site that shows up for its name and vanishes when people search for the service. The site that used to show up and then disappeared. Each situation has a quick check and a job of its own.

Think of the emergency room. Before any test, a nurse asks what you feel and where it hurts. The answer decides the room, the line, and the doctor. Nobody orders a CT scan for a cut finger. This is called triage, and this page triages your site.

The whole mechanism is in the piece on how to get your site on Google. It covers the four doors a page passes through before it reaches the searcher’s screen: crawling, indexing, ranking, and presentation. I will not repeat that explanation here. Here you find out which door to start with.

First things first: does the site open in a browser?

Among the searches related to this phrase, measured in Brazil, where we are based, a different kind of problem shows up: the site that will not even open in a browser. ¹ If that is your case, Google has not entered the story yet. Your first call goes to your hosting company.

Fix it quickly, because Google’s crawler runs into the same locked door. When the server responds with an error, Google slows down its visits. Pages already in the index are kept for a while and eventually dropped. ²

There is a neighboring case that looks like a browser problem and actually runs through Google. The site opens, but first a warning screen appears saying the site is dangerous. A hacked site, or one with malware, can get that screen in the browser and a warning label in search results. ³ That case belongs to the fourth group, further down.

The one-minute test that sorts the cases

Before you conclude the site is gone, confirm it. Google’s help says many people assume they are not on Google when their page simply appears low in results. Sometimes the page is left out because of a detail of the search. The help’s own example is searching on a phone for a page that only works on a desktop. ⁴

The test the same help suggests takes one minute. Turn off SafeSearch, which may be filtering your results. Then search for site: followed by your domain, as in site:yourcompany.com. ⁴

Did at least one page come up? Then the site is in Google’s index. If nothing came up, Google has no page of yours stored, or has not had time to store one yet. The test answers that yes-or-no question. For counting pages it misleads you, and the piece on the four doors shows why. Write down the result and move on to the list below.

Which case is yours

Read the four descriptions and stop at the first one that matches what you see.

1. The site is new. It went live a few days or a few weeks ago, and the test came back empty or nearly empty.
2. It does not show up even for its name. The site has been around longer, and the one-minute test found nothing.
3. It shows up for its name, but not for the service. People who search for the company find the site. People who search for what you sell do not.
4. It used to show up and disappeared. The site was getting visits from Google, then stopped showing up.

Case 1: the site is new

Publishing does not put a site on Google right away. The crawler has to discover the address, visit the page, and then store what it read. According to Google’s help, that path typically takes anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks, depending on many factors. ⁴

Google discovers new sites from sites it already knows. A page needs a link from a known page, or a sitemap. ^{4 5} A newborn site gets almost no links. Platforms such as Wix and Squarespace will probably tell Google about new pages on their own, according to the same help. ⁵

The check takes four steps:

1. Add the site to Search Console, if you have not done so yet. The diagnosis Google’s help walks you through starts there. ⁴
2. Paste your homepage address into the inspection bar at the top of Search Console, and read the status. ⁶
3. If the page is out of the index and nothing is blocking it, request indexing. For a new site, Google calls that request the best first step. ⁵
4. Write down the date. The help asks you to allow at least a week after the request before assuming a problem. ⁴

Asking again speeds nothing up. There is a quota for requests, and repeating the request for the same address does not bring the crawler any faster. ⁷

Before you wait out the week, check the box that hides a site while it is under construction. It is explained in case 2.

Among the four doors, you are at the first one, crawling. The pace at which Google visits each site follows its own logic, laid out in the piece on crawling and crawl budget.

Case 2: it does not show up even for its name

The first stop is the inspection tool. Paste in your homepage address. If the status is “URL is not on Google,” open the details, because the reason is usually there. ⁶

The most common reasons, according to Google’s help, are three blocks. The robots.txt file, the noindex rule, and password protection. ⁴

Picture a shop with a sign in its storefront window: no photos. The photographer for the city guide walks by, reads the sign, and moves on. The shop stays open to anyone who walks through the door. It just stays out of the guide. On a web page, that sign is one line of code. This is called noindex.

When the crawler reads that line, Google drops the entire page from its results. That holds even if other sites link to it. ⁸

In WordPress, a single checkbox can hang that sign on the whole site. It sits on the Reading Settings screen, under Search Engine Visibility, labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” Once checked, it puts the noindex rule into the code of the entire site. ⁹ The box exists to hide a site while it is being built. If nobody unchecked it at launch, the site was born hidden. Other platforms, such as Wix and Blogger, may have their own search engine settings page. ⁸

The robots.txt file works differently. It is a set of rules for the crawler, read at the site’s front door, and it exists mainly to avoid overloading the server. ¹⁰ One wrong rule there can keep Google from crawling entire sections. ⁵

In the Page indexing report, the two blocks have names of their own: “URL blocked by robots.txt” and “URL marked ‘noindex’”. ⁵ The robots.txt file stops the page at the first door. The noindex rule stops it at the second.

If nothing is blocking the site, open the Manual actions report. Think of a fine written by a flesh-and-blood inspector who looked at your case in person. A person at Google reviewed the site and concluded that pages on it break the spam policies. This is called a manual action. With one in place, part of the site or all of it stops showing up in results. ¹¹ With no action, the report shows a green check mark. ¹¹

A domain you bought or inherited from someone else deserves a closer look. It may have come with an old action, and the report’s history will show it. ⁴

One variation of this case remains. The one-minute test found your pages, but a search for your name brings up other companies. In my book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, I use the image of an archivist. You ask for John Smith’s file, and he comes back with three hundred folders with that name on the cover. ¹² If your company’s name is also the name of other things, a search for it returns the whole pile. The site is in the index. What is missing is Google connecting that name to your company, and that work is a field of its own. ¹²

Case 3: it shows up for its name, but not for the service

Start with the good news. The site is in the index, and the search for your name just proved it. Nothing is blocking anything. For the service search, Google does not show your page, or shows it so far down that nobody scrolls that far.

The check lives in the Performance report in Search Console. Open the Queries tab and look for the words that describe your service. The report shows impressions, the number of times your site appeared, and the average position of your topmost result. ¹³ Three readings are possible.

If the query shows up with an average position of 40, the site is there, too far down to be seen. You are at the third door, ranking.

The query may not show up on the list at all. For that search, Google is not showing the page. The documentation lists reasons an indexed page may not appear. The first is content that does not answer what people are searching for. ¹⁴

There is also the case of a good position that you cannot see when you search. The report warns that this happens. Results change with the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching. ¹³

The screen itself also changes format with the question. ¹⁴ What fills that screen today, element by element, is covered in the piece on the first page of Google.

Among the four doors, this case lives at the third and the fourth, ranking and presentation. This is where the triage ends. Moving up for that search is a different job, and no one-minute check solves it.

Case 4: it used to show up and disappeared

First, measure the disappearance. Did one page vanish, or the whole site, or did only the traffic fall? If the site still shows up and only the visits went down, you are looking at a traffic drop. That calls for a separate diagnosis: why organic traffic dropped. This section is about the site that truly vanished.

Open four Search Console reports, in this order:

1. Manual actions. This is the fine from case 2. The report shows the green check mark, or the action with the pages it affects. ¹¹
2. Security issues. It flags content placed on the site without permission, through hacking, and behavior that could harm visitors. It is the report tied to the warning screen from the start of this piece. ³
3. Page indexing. Look for a drop in total indexed pages without a matching rise in errors. According to the help, that pattern points to a block by robots.txt, noindex, or a required login. Look for a spike in non-indexed pages on the same date. ⁵
4. The URL removal tool. Check whether someone requested the removal of the site or of a page. An approved request can be revoked. ⁴

The first two make up exam 1 of the SEO audit, the check for whatever blocks the whole site. The other two look at one address at a time.

The date of the disappearance helps you read the reports. Google’s guide to traffic drops separates two patterns. A site-wide problem, such as the site being down, knocks everything out at once. A noindex rule added by mistake takes pages out more slowly, because it depends on the crawler reaching each page. ¹⁵

If the disappearance came after a redesign, compare the dates. Google’s help mentions restructuring the site, moving to a new domain, and switching to https. Pages that used to do well can drop when the move had mistakes, and the fix it gives is 301 redirects. ⁴

The question you ask from now on

When someone tells you their site vanished from Google, your first question is now a different one. Vanished from which search? For the name, or for the service? Since forever, or since Tuesday? Each answer points to a door, and each door calls for different work.

Grab a sheet of paper now. Write down the date, the result of the one-minute test, and your case number. Run the check for your case and note what Search Console told you. With the sheet filled in, open the piece on the four doors at the door your case pointed to.