If your website is not showing up on Google, it is almost always one of four things: the site is too new, Google has not indexed it yet, a setting is blocking Google, or the site is indexed but ranking too low for anyone to find. The first three you can check yourself in about five minutes, and none of them need a developer.
I get this question more than any other. Usually the person asking has just paid for a website, waited a fortnight, searched for their business name, found nothing, and started to worry they have been ripped off. Most of the time they have not been. Here is how to work out which of the four it is.
Indexing and Ranking Are Two Different Problems
This is the distinction that clears up most of the confusion, so it is worth two minutes.
Indexing is whether Google has your pages at all. Its crawler visits your site, reads the pages, and stores a copy in its index. No index entry, no chance of appearing for anything, including your own business name.
Ranking is where you sit once you are in there. That is the competitive part, decided by how useful and trustworthy your pages look next to everyone else’s.
People almost always assume they have a ranking problem when they have an indexing problem, or the reverse. If you search your exact business name and get nothing, that is indexing. If your business name brings you up first but “electrician Joondalup” does not, you are indexed fine and you have a ranking problem, which is a much longer job.
| Not indexed | Indexed but not ranking | |
|---|---|---|
| How to tell | A site: search on your domain returns nothing | A site: search returns your pages |
| Searching your own business name | Nothing comes up | You come up, usually first |
| Most likely cause | Site is new, or a setting is blocking Google | Competitors have more content, links and reviews |
| What fixes it | Search Console, sitemap, remove the block | Months of content, local SEO and reviews |
| Realistic timeframe | Days to a few weeks | Three to six months and ongoing |
Worth knowing before you panic: Google’s own documentation says it can take a few weeks for Google to notice a new site or any changes to an existing one, and that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
Check It Yourself Right Now
Work through these in order. You need no tools beyond a browser, and steps one to four take about a minute each.
- 1
Run a site: search on your own domain
Type site:yourdomain.com.au into Google, with no space after the colon and nothing else in the box. Every page Google holds for you comes back. Nothing at all means you are not indexed. A handful of pages means you are indexed but incomplete.
- 2
Set up Google Search Console
It is free and it is the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Verify ownership, submit your sitemap (usually yourdomain.com.au/sitemap.xml), then use URL Inspection on your homepage to see its actual status.
- 3
Look for a noindex tag
Right-click your homepage, choose View Page Source, and search the code for the word noindex. If it is there, you are actively telling Google to ignore the page. This is the single most common cause on brand new sites.
- 4
Check your robots.txt file
Visit yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / on its own line, your whole site is blocked from crawling. Developers set this during a build and forget to remove it more often than anyone likes to admit.
- 5
Confirm there is real content to index
Google indexes words. A homepage that is a full-width photo, a logo and a phone number gives it almost nothing to work with. If you cannot find fifty words of readable text on your main page, that is your answer.
If steps one to four come back clean and you are still not appearing, run your site through the free website audit. It checks your titles, headings, speed and indexability in about ten seconds and will usually tell you which of the causes below applies to you.
The Most Common Causes, and How to Fix Each One
In rough order of how often I see them.
1. The Site Is Simply Too New
If your site went live in the last month, this is the most likely answer by a wide margin. There is nothing to fix. Submit your sitemap in Search Console, keep adding real content, and check again in a few weeks. Chasing this one with tools and plugins wastes money.
2. Google Has Not Been Told the Site Exists
Google finds sites by following links and by reading sitemaps. A brand new site with no links pointing at it from anywhere else is genuinely hard to discover. Google lists exactly this as a reason it misses sites, along with the site being new and the site being hard to crawl.
The fix is Search Console: verify the site, submit the sitemap, and use URL Inspection to request indexing for your most important pages. Do it once. Google is explicit that requesting a crawl again for the same URL will not get it crawled any faster, and that requesting a crawl does not guarantee inclusion at all.
3. A Setting Is Blocking Google
The noindex tag and the robots.txt block from the checks above. Both are switches somebody flipped, usually deliberately during the build so the half-finished site stayed private, and then never flipped back. Turn them off and the site typically appears within days.
4. There Is Not Enough on the Page
Three pages with forty words each is a thin site, and Google is under no obligation to index it. This is not about writing essays. It is about each page answering, in plain words, what you do, where you do it and who for. One properly written service page beats six near-empty ones.
5. You Are Indexed, You Are Just Not Ranking
The site: search shows your pages, so Google has you. You are simply not in the top results for the terms you are checking. This is normal for a new site against established competitors and it is the one problem on this list that time and effort fix rather than a setting. If this is you, the work is SEO, not troubleshooting.
There is a local version of this worth naming. Plenty of Perth business owners search something broad like “plumber Perth”, see one of the big franchise operators and a directory listing, and conclude they are invisible. Meanwhile they rank perfectly well for “blocked drain Bassendean”, which is the search that actually brings a paying job through the door. Before you decide you have a problem, check the terms a real customer in your suburb would type, not the widest one you can think of. If you serve a specific area, local SEO across Perth is a narrower and far more winnable target than the whole city.
Squarespace and GoDaddy Have Their Own Traps
If you are wondering why your Squarespace website is not showing up on Google, check the platform settings before anything else. Squarespace’s own help documentation is clear that search engines will not find trial, expired or cancelled sites, so an unpaid trial site will never appear no matter what else you do. Beyond that, check for a site-wide or page-level password, make sure “Hide this page from search results” is unticked in the SEO tab of each page’s settings, confirm the page is enabled, and remove any noindex code sitting in code injection.
GoDaddy sites have a different failure mode. The usual culprits are a site that was built but never actually published, or a domain whose DNS is not pointing at the builder site, so the address people visit is not the site you have been working on. Confirm the live URL in a private browser window before assuming Google is the problem. GoDaddy publishes its own guide to this if you want their steps.
When It Is Worth Getting Help
Honestly, for most of what is on this page, it is not. If your site is under three months old, indexed, and has real content on it, the correct move is to do nothing except keep adding pages worth reading. Paying someone to speed that up is paying for patience.
It is worth a conversation when you have worked through every check above, your site is indexed, and months have passed with nothing coming in. At that point the question stops being “why is my website not showing up on Google” and becomes “why is it not competitive”, which is a different job involving your content, your Google Business Profile and your reviews.
If you want a second opinion, I offer a free 15-minute chat. No pitch, just straight answers about whether you have a real problem or just a young website. If you would rather I go through it properly, that is what a website and marketing audit is for.
Questions I Get Asked About This
Frequently Asked Questions
How long until a new website shows up on Google?
Google says it can take a few weeks to notice a new site, and that crawling itself takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Appearing for your own business name usually happens first. Appearing for competitive search terms takes months of work on top of that, not days.
How do I check if my site is indexed?
Search Google for site: followed immediately by your domain, with no spaces and nothing else, for example site:yourdomain.com.au. Every page Google currently holds for your site comes back. If nothing comes back, you are not indexed. Google Search Console gives you the same answer in more detail.
How do I get Google to index my site faster?
Verify your site in Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and use URL Inspection to request indexing for your key pages. Do it once. Google states that requesting a recrawl repeatedly for the same URL will not get it crawled any faster, and that a request does not guarantee inclusion.
Why is only my homepage showing up on Google search?
Usually because your other pages are not linked from anywhere Google can follow, are missing from your sitemap, or are too thin to be worth indexing. Check that every important page is reachable by clicking from your homepage, and that each one has real content on it.
Does social media help my site show up on Google?
Not directly. Google has said consistently that social media posts are not a direct ranking factor. Social can still help indirectly, by getting your site in front of people who then link to it or search for you by name, but posting more will not fix an indexing problem.
If you have gone through all of this and you are still stuck, run the free audit and send me the result. It usually takes me about two minutes to spot what is going on.
