A website missing from Google almost always falls into one of three situations: it is not indexed, it is indexed but lacks the content needed to rank, or it ranks on keywords nobody searches for. The distinction matters, because the fixes have nothing in common. Here are the eight real causes, in the order you should check them.
First check: does Google even know your website?
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. The number of results shown is the number of pages Google has recorded.
- No results: your website is not indexed. Causes 1 to 3 apply to you.
- Only a few results: part of the site is blocked. See causes 3 and 4.
- All your pages appear: the problem is not indexing but ranking. Go straight to cause 5.
1. The website blocks search engines
This is the most common cause, and the most annoying. During a build, Google is deliberately kept away. Once the site goes live, nobody remembers to lift the block.
Check two things. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt: a Disallow: / line forbids everything. Then view the source of your home page and look for noindex: its presence explicitly asks Google to ignore you. In WordPress, a single setting controls both, under Settings then Reading.
2. The website is too new
Google takes a few days to a few weeks to discover a new website. There is nothing to fix, only to speed up: create a Search Console account, verify ownership of the domain, submit your sitemap, then request indexing of the home page.
A new website also carries little credibility with Google for several months. Serious results rarely arrive before the third month.
3. A technical fault blocks crawling
Expired security certificate, redirect loops, a slow server, pages returning errors, an invalid sitemap: each of these can interrupt crawling. Search Console reports them under Indexing. A technical audit identifies and prioritises them in a single pass.
4. Content is duplicated
If the same page exists at several addresses, with and without www, in http and https, with and without a trailing slash, Google hesitates and keeps none of them. One address per page, with the others permanently redirecting to it. The same problem appears when text comes from a supplier catalogue, copied identically across dozens of websites.
5. Your pages do not have enough content
A two-hundred-word page will not rank on anything competitive. Google needs material to understand your subject and to judge that your answer beats the others.
Expect a minimum of six hundred words per service page, and aim for eight hundred to twelve hundred on your strategic pages. Above all, write to answer a precise question rather than to fill space. Web content writing is the most profitable line item in an SEO strategy.
6. You target unreachable keywords
A craftsman hoping to rank for "plumber" is up against national directories established for fifteen years. "Emergency leak repair Lyon 3rd" is reachable within months.
| Type of query | Example | Difficulty | Buying intent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generic | plumber | Very high | Low |
| Generic and local | plumber Lyon | High | Medium |
| Precise and local | emergency leak repair Lyon 3rd | Moderate | Very high |
| Question | how much does a plumbing callout cost | Low | Medium |
Start at the bottom of the table. Precise queries bring fewer visitors, but those visitors buy. That is the logic behind our SEO campaigns.
7. Nobody talks about you
Google measures your credibility by the number and quality of websites that cite you. A website with no inbound links hits a ceiling, however good its content. Start with the professional directories in your sector, partners, suppliers and local press. Link building is long-term work.
8. The website is too slow or unusable on mobile
Google indexes the mobile version first. A website that takes more than three seconds to display, or whose buttons are too small, loses rankings. Test your home page with PageSpeed Insights: below fifty on mobile, speed is costing you traffic. The usual causes are uncompressed images, a bloated theme and undersized hosting, three things our maintenance centre handles.
Key takeaway: always check in this order. Indexing, then content, then keyword choice, then authority. Building authority for a website blocked by a noindex achieves precisely nothing.
How long before you see a change
Lifting a noindex shows an effect within days. Enriching content takes four to eight weeks. Authority work is judged over six months. For a precise diagnosis of your case, request a free audit: we send back the list of actions, ranked by impact.