Is your website not showing up on Google?
It’s normal for a new website not to appear on Google search, but if your site is a few months old and still not showing up on SERP (Search Engine Results Page), your site has technical SEO problems.
Google only shows webpages, and if you are searching for a keyword that your site ranks for and cannot find it on the search results page, then maybe your content is not valuable enough to be on the top of SERP.
Nevertheless, multiple issues can prevent Google from showing your site on SERP.
Let’s find out the issues and figure out how to fix them.
7 Possible Reasons Your Website is Not Showing Up On Google
Before you try to rank your website, you should know that Google ranks web pages, not websites.
When you search for your website on Google, you are looking for a specific page on your website related to the search query or keyword.
Several technical SEO issues prevent Google from showing your website on SERP, and many of these issues are easy to fix.
Here are seven possible reasons why your website is not yet showing on Google:
1. Your Website is New
It takes time for Google to discover new pages.
Every time someone enters a search query, Google bots crawl and index web pages and show the most relevant results on the web.
It can take anywhere between 7 days to a month for Google to index a brand-new website.
Hence, when your webpage does not appear on SERP. Check whether Google even knows about your webpage in the first place.
You can run a search for site:yourwebsite.com to know if your webpage exists on Google or not.
If the search results page shows your website, it means your website exists on Google. Otherwise, Google is yet to discover the existence of your site.
Sometimes Google might know your website but not your web pages. You can check whether a specific page of your website exists on Google or not by searching for:
site:yourwebsite.com/a-page-you-want-to-show-up-in-google/
If you can see at least one result from your website, it means Google knows about your webpage.
2. Google is Not Crawling Your Pages
Whenever someone enters a search query, Google sends an army of bots or crawlers to discover new and updated content related to the keyword search.
Note that if Google already knows about your site, you can see it on SERP using your website URL.
Many websites use robots.txt.file, which tells Google bots what they can crawl and cannot crawl your site.
The file lists all the content of your webpage that you may want to block from Google.
The robots.txt.file uses directives such as ‘’allow’’, ‘’disallow’’, or ‘’sitemap’’ in the embedded HTML code to block Google from crawling your website.
You can check if your site has a robot.txt.file using the URL ‘’yourdomain.com/robots.txt’’. Here is a robots.txt.file of Amazon.com
You can see Amazon prevents a few pages from crawling using the ‘’disallow’’ directive.
You can remove these disallow directories from your sitemap on Google Console and allow Google to crawl your website and consider ranking.
Note: You will see an ‘’error 404’’ if your site does not have any robots.txt.file.
You can also submit your sitemap to Google console and check if Google is crawling your website or not.
HTML codes can be complex, so it’s best to hire a website expert to fix them.
3. Your Website is Blocking Search Engines From Indexing Pages
There are billions of web pages on Google, and after crawling, Google bots have the job of indexing those pages.
Indexing is the process by which Google bots organize and store information to display on SERP.
In other words, it’s an online directory of web pages for billions of keywords and search queries.
If there are ‘’noindex’’ meta tags in your web page HTML tag, Google won’t index your website pages. Hence not ranking them on SERP.
The ‘’noindex’’ tags allow you to block search engines from indexing your web pages.
Sometimes these tags can be a default feature in WordPress or Wix websites. Check your webpages for ‘’noindex’’ tags and replace them with ‘’index’’ in your website HTML code.
4. Your Domain Rating is Low
Google does not clearly state DR (Domain Rating) as a ranking factor in its guidelines, but there is a direct correlation between DR and ranking on websites.
75% of the top-ranking websites on SERP have a higher DR above 80+.
A higher DR indicates the authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the websites. Sometimes users only want to see trustworthy information from experts backed by data and facts, and Google views websites with higher DR as reliable.
For instance, if you see the DR of the top SERP results for the keyword ‘best laptops,’ you will notice that the top two results have a DR of above 90.
Google knows people want to buy the best quality products, and to provide them with insightful information and the best prices; search engines show results with higher DR.
If your website is not showing up on Google, maybe your DR is low. You need to boost your DR as high as your competitors to appear in the top SERP results.
5. Your Content is Duplicate
Google detects duplicate content if two different URLs have a similar webpage.
In that case, Google does not index duplicate pages because two similar pages might take up unnecessary space and confuse the users.
Google tries to find the authentic version of a webpage to show it on SERP and avoids indexing the duplicate page.
Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm’s ability to figure out a duplicate page is not perfect. Therefore, the DR of one website is split into two, causing your site to rank lower.
If your webpage is similar to other pages on Google, it may not appear on SERP because Google might consider it a duplicate copy.
You can fix this issue by running a website audit check on the Google search console. The content quality report displays similar pages. Analyze them and add canonical tags to allow Google to index your webpage.
6. Technical Issues in a Website
Technical issues, including HTTP errors, DNS problems, loading speed, and server crashes, can prevent Google from crawling or indexing your website, which results in a website not showing up on Google.
If your website experiences frequent technical problems, it can be difficult to appear on SERP.
Another technical issue might be the use of JavaScript on a website. Search engines might find it difficult to crawl JavaScript, which makes it problematic for indexing and ranking.
If navigational pages of your site, such as the menu or blog page, are in JavaScript, Google may face trouble while crawling those links, which can reduce site visibility.
7. Your Website Has a Google Penalty
Google penalizes websites that do not follow the webmaster guidelines and practice black hat SEO techniques to rank on Google.
There are two kinds of penalties:
Manual Penalty
Someone from Google manually reviews your websites. Suppose there are any discrepancies like buying or selling of backlinks, spamming, using thin content, or keyword stuffing. They might demote your ranking on the search results.
A manual penalty is rare and only happens when a website completely disregards Google’s guidelines.
Algorithmic Penalty
Google’s algorithm might penalize your website by lowering its ranking and traffic. It happens due to content quality issues. Maybe your content is not authentic or does not follow SEO best practices for Google to consider it for ranking.
Moreover, maybe your competitors are creating content that performs one step better than users – catering to more search queries and extended search intent.
Google might drop a message in your Google console inbox before levying a manual penalty. You can avoid penalties by complying with guidelines.
What to Do For Your Website to Show Up On Google?
To ensure your website shows up on Google:
- Google should discover your website and needs access to all your web pages.
- Your website should have relevant content for a potential keyword you want to rank for.
- The webpage should be worthy of ranking on Google. In short, it should provide value to Google users and searchers.
Here is how you can ensure your website shows up on Google.
1. Submit a Sitemap to Google Console
A sitemap helps Google crawl all the pages on your website effectively.
It’s a file that contains information about your website pages, images, and videos on your site. Ensure your site architecture is simple and flat such that it should not take more than three clicks to navigate to other site pages.
Remember, a flat site architecture improves user experience.
If your site is new or if it’s not showing up on Google, submit your sitemap to Google Console.
This helps Google discover your website, crawl your web pages, and index them to show on SERP.
You need to follow other SEO best practices like interlinks, backlinks, and using keywords to appear on top of the SERP.
2. Conduct An SEO Audit of Your Website
An SEO audit is like a health check-up for your website. The report will be a detailed summary of all the issues on your website, which includes:
- On-page SEO optimization
- Off-page SEO optimization
- Keyword selections
For instance, the report lists all the technical issues related to HTML codes, meta robot tags, site speed, and SEO issues like link building and domain authority.
You can use online tools like SEM Rush website audit or Ahrefs site audit tool to conduct a thorough SEO review of your website.
Consider hiring an SEO expert like Authority Magnet to fix the technical issues on your website and rank on SERP.
3. Remove Zombie Pages
Zombie pages are irrelevant web pages on your website that may have lost relevance over time.
These pages do not add value to your site and occupy unwanted storage space.
Google has reiterated that having more pages on a website does not make your content better for ranking.
You simply need to type site:yourwebsite.com, to see how many pages of your site are indexed by Google.
You can see that our website has 20 indexed pages, and all of them might not be relevant to a user.
Most websites have 30-40% more pages indexed, which means Google is indexing even the irrelevant pages of your website, affecting your website’s relevancy factor.
Find such zombie pages and discard them from your website.
Zombie pages on a website are:
- Archives
- Old press releases
- Boilerplate content
- Category pages
- Thin content
Optimize your website based on your niche to boost traffic, improve domain authority and rank on SERP.
4. Publish Authentic SEO Content Consistently
A website is not going to show up on Google overnight.
You need an SEO content strategy to appear on the Google search results page.
Start by publishing a significant amount of problem-solving content, or if you are an E-commerce website, optimize your website for E-commerce SEO.
Target keywords, improve user experience, and make your site mobile-friendly to bring organic traffic and rank on Google.
5. Run a Competitor Analysis
Your competitors are already ranking on Google. Spy on them and figure out their content strategy, backlinks, and domain rating. Observe how you can match their expertise and become better.
Find your competitor keywords using the SEM rush tool and try to rank for them.
Compare the pages of your website with your competitors and analyze who links to those pages. Check their backlinks to find authoritative sites in your niche to push your backlink strategy.
Also, observe what kind of content works best in your niche:
For example, a listicle, long-form, definitive or short-form content.
Align your content on similar lines to satisfy the search intent and ensure your site appears on Google.
6. Seek Backlinks
High-quality backlinks can rank your website faster on SERP.
To build your backlinks:
- Reach out to your competitors and help them add value to their websites using guest blog posts.
- Make your content 10X better by adding a survey or research report and attract opportunities for others to link back to you.
- You can personally send emails to website admins and ask them to use your research in their content to improve topical value.
Put effort into building backlinks and improving your content for a few months consistently.
Your website will show on SERP shortly as your DR improves.
7. Ensure Google Indexes Only a Single Version of Your Website
Sometimes Google might index several versions of your website separately.
For example:
http://www.yoursite.com
http://yoursite.com
Surprisingly Google treats all these different versions as separate websites instead of one, which might confuse the algorithm, and other versions of your site might become duplicate copies.
You can merge them all together.
Type all different versions of your website in the browser, and 301 redirect to the final URL of the site you want to use.
This method also helps you merge different versions of a webpage together.
Verdict
Website not showing up on Google is a common error for a new website or when you do not optimize a site for SEO.
You can fix most of the issues with the help of an SEO audit and by publishing content that provides value to the SERP. However, consulting an SEO expert can benefit you further by resolving issues related to meta tags and technical problems in a site.
Note: Overall, it may take around 4-6 months for a website to rank organically on SERP.
