Why is my website not showing on Google? 10 things to check

This is the most common reason — and the one most people don't want to hear. Google doesn't trust new domains immediately. A brand new website typically takes 3-6 months before it starts ranking meaningfully for anything, even with perfect technical setup. During that time, Google is crawling your site, assessing your content, and building a picture of what you're about.

If your site is less than 3 months old and you've done everything else correctly, patience is genuinely the answer. This isn't a bug — it's Google's trust-building process at work.

Google finds most websites through links from other sites. If no other website links to yours yet, Google may not have discovered it. You can speed this up significantly by submitting directly.

This catches out more website owners than you'd believe. WordPress has a setting called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" — often turned on during development and forgotten about. One checkbox is hiding your entire site from Google.

A file called robots.txt tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they're allowed to access. If this file contains a "Disallow: /" instruction, it's telling Google to stay out entirely — and Google will respect that instruction.

Google confirmed years ago that SSL — the technology that puts https:// and a padlock in your browser address bar — is a ranking signal. Sites without SSL rank lower and may not rank at all for competitive terms. Chrome also shows "Not Secure" warnings to visitors, increasing bounce rates and signalling poor site quality to Google.

Check your site right now. If you see http:// instead of https://, you're missing SSL.

Google's crawlers visit your site regularly. If your site is slow to respond or frequently unavailable, Google reduces how often it crawls you — and slow crawling means slower indexing of new content and lower rankings overall. Poor hosting is a direct cause of poor Google visibility.

Check your site speed at gtmetrix.com. Look at "Time to First Byte" — if it's above 600ms consistently, your hosting server is responding too slowly. Check your uptime history with a free tool like UptimeRobot.

Individual pages can be marked with a "noindex" tag — an instruction telling Google not to include that page in search results. This is useful for things like thank-you pages and admin pages, but if it's applied to your main pages by mistake, those pages will never appear in Google.

Google prioritises pages that provide genuine value to searchers. Pages with very little content (under 300 words), pages that are near-identical copies of other pages on your site, or pages with content copied from elsewhere are ranked poorly or not indexed at all.

This is particularly common on new sites with placeholder pages, product pages with minimal descriptions, or sites that have copied content from suppliers or competitors.

Links from other websites to yours — called backlinks — are one of Google's most important ranking signals. A new site with zero backlinks has no external evidence that it's a credible, useful resource. Google uses links to discover new pages and to assess the authority of the sites it ranks.

This doesn't mean you need hundreds of links. A handful of genuine, relevant links from real websites can make a significant difference for a new site.

Sometimes the issue isn't that Google can't find your site — it's that you're searching for terms your site doesn't rank for yet. Your site may already be indexed and ranking for long-tail variations of your target keywords that you haven't checked.

A new local plumbing business is unlikely to rank for "plumber" — but it might already rank for "plumber [suburb name]" or "emergency plumber [city] 24 hour." Check Search Console's Performance report to see exactly what searches are bringing people to your site.