Why is my site not in Google?

How Google finds your site

Google uses programs called crawlers that download pages. Google then analyses the content and stores it in a large database, the index. Only when someone searches does Google choose the pages from that index that fit best.¹

Two things are important to know. Google does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or show a page, even if everything is right. And Google does not accept payment to visit a site more often or rank it higher.¹

The most common causes

If your site is not in Google, the problem is almost always one of these six.

1. Too new

   A new site has not been discovered yet. Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.²

   How to find it: Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and request indexing.

2. robots.txt

   This file tells crawlers which pages they may view. One wrong line shuts off your whole site.³

   How to find it: Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it says "Disallow: /", everything is blocked.

3. noindex

   A page with "noindex" is removed from the search results. Web developers sometimes switch this on during the build and forget it afterwards.⁴

   How to find it: Search Console shows pages with "URL marked noindex".

4. Technical errors

   A server error or a page that looks empty (soft 404) is not included.⁵

   How to find it: The Page indexing report in Search Console gives the reason for each page.

5. Duplicate content

   If the same content is on several addresses, Google chooses one itself. The rest drops out.⁵

   How to find it: Search Search Console for "Duplicate without user-selected canonical".

6. Crawled, not indexed

   Google has seen the page but has not included it (yet). According to Google this is not necessarily a problem, but it is often a sign that the page adds little.⁵

   How to find it: Make the page more specific and more useful, with real information.

Work it out in fifteen minutes

1. Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google. If you see nothing, not a single page is in the index.
2. Add your site to Google Search Console, for free, and verify it through your domain provider.
3. Submit your sitemap and use URL inspection for your homepage. There you can see whether Google knows the page.
4. Look at the Page indexing report. It shows, page by page, why a page was not included.⁵
5. Also add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. Several AI search features, including ChatGPT Search, take results from the Bing index.⁶

How Ekkora handles it

Findability is one of the eight checks before launch: titles, descriptions, sitemap and structured data. At handover we submit the site to Google and Bing. With the free website check you can see in half a minute whether your own site is set up to be found.