You built the site. You launched it. You typed your business name into Google and got nothing — or worse, you got your competitor.
This is one of the most common things clients bring us at EVILTEC, and in most cases it turns out to be one of about nine things. Several of them take ten minutes to fix. A couple take longer. But almost none of them are mysterious once you know where to look.
Before anything else, let’s separate two problems people constantly confuse.
“Not indexed” and “not ranking” are different problems
Not indexed means Google doesn’t have your page in its database at all. It cannot show you for anything, ever, until that changes.
Not ranking means Google has your page — it’s just putting fourteen other pages above it.
These need completely different fixes, so find out which one you have first.
Open a Google search and type:
site:yourdomain.com
If results come back, your site is indexed. Your problem is ranking, and reasons 5 through 9 below are where to look. If you get nothing at all, you have an indexing problem — start at reason 1.
Now the nine reasons, roughly in order of how often we actually find them.
Why us My Website Not Showing Up on Google?
1. The site is simply too new
Google has to find your site before it can index it, and discovery isn’t instant. For a brand-new domain with no inbound links, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
How to fix it: set up Google Search Console if you haven’t, submit your sitemap, then use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing on your most important pages. That’s a nudge, not a guarantee, but it usually shortens the wait considerably.
Then get at least one real link pointing at the site. A link from any indexed page gives Google’s crawler a path to follow, and a new site with zero inbound links can sit undiscovered for a surprisingly long time.
2. A noindex tag is still on the page
This is the one that makes developers wince, because it’s so common and so avoidable.
During development, sites are usually set to discourage search engines. In WordPress that’s a single checkbox under Settings → Reading. In Yoast or Rank Math it’s a per-page toggle. Someone forgets to turn it off at launch, and the site is invisible — permanently, silently, and with no error message anywhere.
How to fix it: view your page source (Ctrl+U) and search for noindex. If you find this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
that’s your answer. Remove it, then request re-indexing in Search Console. Google’s own documentation on blocking indexing covers the variants.
We have found a stray noindex on live client sites that had been up for months. If you check nothing else on this list, check this.
3. robots.txt is blocking the crawler
Your robots.txt file tells crawlers where they may go. Misconfigured, it tells them to go nowhere.
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
you are blocking every crawler from your entire site.
How to fix it: remove the blanket disallow. Most sites need very little in robots.txt — blocking an admin directory, pointing at the sitemap, not much else. If you’re not sure what a line does, it probably shouldn’t be there.
Worth knowing: robots.txt stops crawling, not indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt but linked from elsewhere can still show up as a bare URL with no description. If you genuinely want a page kept out of search, use noindex, not robots.txt.
4. You’re searching in a way that hides your own site
Not every “my site isn’t on Google” is a technical problem. Sometimes it’s a search problem.
Google personalizes results heavily. If you’ve been clicking your competitor’s site for three weeks while researching, Google has noticed. Your logged-in results are not what a stranger sees.
How to check properly: use an incognito window, or better, check your actual position in Search Console under Performance → Queries. That data is averaged across real users, not shaped by your own browsing.
Also be realistic about the query. If you’re searching a competitive two-word term and you launched six weeks ago, you’re not missing — you’re early.
5. Your pages are orphaned
An orphaned page has no internal links pointing to it. You can reach it if you know the URL, but nothing on your site links there, so Google has no path to it and no signal that it matters.
This happens constantly with service and landing pages. Someone builds a page, publishes it, never adds it to the menu or links it from anywhere, and then wonders why it never ranks.
How to fix it: every page worth ranking should be reachable in two or three clicks from your homepage. Build hub pages that link down to related services, and have those services link back up and sideways to each other.
This is unglamorous, takes about half an hour on a small site, and we’ve seen it move pages that had been stuck for months. Internal linking is the most underrated technical SEO work there is.
6. The content is thin or duplicated
Google indexes selectively. It has no obligation to store a page that adds nothing, and it often won’t.
Thin content means a page with very little unique substance — a 150-word service page, a location page that’s identical to nine others with the city swapped, a product page with only a manufacturer’s description.
Duplicate content means the same text appearing on multiple URLs, whether across your own site or copied from elsewhere.
How to fix it: make each page genuinely worth having. If two pages serve the same purpose, merge them and redirect one. If you’ve generated location or service pages from a template, give each one real local detail rather than a find-and-replace.
This is the point where “SEO” stops being technical and becomes editorial. Our SEO services usually find both problems on the same site.
7. A canonical tag points somewhere else
A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the real version of a page. It exists to solve duplicate content, and it works — sometimes too well.
If page A has a canonical tag pointing at page B, you’ve told Google to index B and ignore A. Plugins, page builders and migrations all do this by accident. We see it most on WooCommerce product variants and on sites migrated from a staging domain, where every canonical still points at the old URL.
How to fix it: check the page source for rel=”canonical”. It should point at the page you’re looking at, unless you have a specific reason otherwise. In Search Console, the URL Inspection tool shows you the “Google-selected canonical”, which is often more informative than what you declared.
8. The site is slow enough to hurt crawling
Page speed affects rankings directly, but there’s a second effect people miss: Google allocates a finite amount of crawling to each site. A slow server means fewer pages crawled per visit, which means new and updated pages get picked up more slowly.
On WordPress this is usually the theme and the plugin stack rather than the host. Page builders are the common culprit — we build in Elementor regularly and know exactly what it costs in render-blocking assets if nobody tunes it.
How to fix it: run your site through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not desktop. Then work in this order: image sizes and formats, render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, unused plugins, caching. Google’s Core Web Vitals guide explains what each metric measures.
Images are almost always the biggest single win and the easiest. A 3MB hero image is costing you more than any plugin setting.
9. You have a manual action
This is the rarest reason, and the only one Google tells you about directly.
A manual action is a human reviewer at Google deciding your site violates their spam policies — usually for bought links, cloaking, scraped content or sneaky redirects. The result is suppression or complete removal from search.
How to check: Search Console → Security & Manual Actions → Manual Actions. If it says “No issues detected”, you don’t have one, and you can stop worrying about it.
If you do have one, read exactly what it cites, fix that specific thing properly, then file a reconsideration request explaining what you changed. Don’t file one before the problem is actually fixed — rejected requests make the next round slower.
Worth noting: if you ever bought backlinks, this is where it surfaces. The fix starts with disavowing them, not with writing more content.
A diagnostic order that saves time
Work through it like this:
- site:yourdomain.com — indexed or not?
- Search Console → Pages — what does Google say about each URL?
- Page source — noindex? wrong canonical?
- /robots.txt — anything blocking?
- Search Console → Manual Actions — clean?
- Internal links — is the page reachable from your homepage?
- PageSpeed Insights — mobile score
Six of those seven take under five minutes. Most “my site isn’t on Google” problems are solved before you reach the end of that list.
If you’ve checked all nine and you’re still invisible
Then the honest answer is usually that nothing is broken — the site just isn’t competitive yet for what you’re targeting. That’s a different problem, and it’s solved with content and links rather than with settings.
If you’d rather not work through it alone, EVILTEC does this diagnostic as a fixed-scope audit: we tell you which of these nine it is, what it will take to fix, and whether your platform even allows the fix. You can see the work we’ve done or get in touch — and if it turns out to be a checkbox in your WordPress settings, we’ll tell you that for free rather than quoting you a retainer.
