This happens all the time. A company launched its new site a month ago, and the owner searches the company name on Google. He finds the Facebook page and a business directory listing, but not the site. Or he finds the home page and none of the service pages.
Google goes through three steps before it shows any page. It discovers the URL, crawls it to read the content, and then decides whether to add it to the index. A problem at any one of those steps means the page will not show up, however good the design is.
How do you know if Google has indexed your website?
The accurate way is Google Search Console. Add your site, open the URL Inspection tool and paste in the page's URL. It tells you whether the page is in the index, when Googlebot last visited it, and why it was excluded if it is not indexed.
You can also type site: followed by your domain into the search box. That only gives you a rough idea, and you should not rely on the number of results it shows. We explain the reports that matter in Google Search Console for beginners.
Is your site blocking Google without you knowing?
This is the cause we see most often after a new site launches. During development the programmer adds a noindex tag to the pages, or blocks crawling in robots.txt, so the staging version does not get indexed. Then the site moves to the real domain and those settings stay as they were.
Check these places:
- The page source. Look for noindex in the meta robots tag or in the X-Robots-Tag header.
- The robots.txt file at the root of the site. A line reading Disallow: / blocks crawling of the entire site.
- WordPress settings. Look for the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" option under Reading.
- The firewall or CDN. Some strict settings block Googlebot or show it a verification page.
- Password protection on the whole site, left over from the review stage.
The robots.txt file controls crawling. It does not hide a page from results. Google says a page blocked there can still be indexed if other links point to it, and it will then appear with no description. To keep a page out of results, use noindex and leave crawling allowed so Google can see the tag.
What does "Crawled, currently not indexed" mean?
It means Google visited the page, read it, and decided not to add it to the index for now. In most cases this is a quality decision. The page may be very short, look like other pages on the site, or add nothing to what already exists on the web.
The related status "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet. On small sites this usually comes down to weak internal linking to the page, or a slow server. In both cases the fix starts with the page itself: clearer content, longer where it needs to be, and links to it from the important pages on your site.
Can duplicate pages make your pages disappear from Google?
Yes, and in a way nobody notices. If your site opens on four versions (with and without www, http and https), or the same service page is reachable at several URLs, Google picks one version and ignores the rest, and it may not pick the one you want.
Make every version redirect with a permanent 301 to one https version, and check that the canonical tag on each page points to that page's correct URL. A common theme bug sets the canonical on every page to the home page, so Google treats all the pages as copies of it.
How do you help Google discover a brand-new website?
Google mostly discovers pages through links, so a new site that no other site links to may wait longer. Submit your sitemap in Search Console, put your site's URL on your Google Maps business profile and your official social accounts, and link every service page from the main menu or from the services page.
- Inspect the URLthe URL Inspection tool in Search Console
- Remove the blocknoindex, robots.txt and the firewall
- Consolidate versions301 redirects and a correct canonical
- Strengthen the pageuseful content and internal links to it
- Request indexingonce, then watch the Pages report
How long does it take a page to appear after you fix the problem?
It can be days or it can stretch to weeks, and Google commits to no deadline. After the fix, request indexing once from the URL Inspection tool, resubmit the sitemap if it changed, and then follow the page indexing report instead of re-requesting every day.
If the problem started after a redesign, the cause is usually old URLs that were never redirected. We wrote about this in redesigning your website without losing rankings, and collected the other checks in our technical SEO checklist.
We check for these causes and fix them as part of our search and AI visibility service. Send us your website address and we will tell you why your pages are not showing and what it takes to fix them.
Questions our partners ask
Do I have to pay Google to show up?
No. Appearing in regular results is free, and there is no official way to buy indexing or rankings. You only pay for ads, which appear in a separate space labeled "Sponsored" or "Ad".
Does requesting indexing over and over speed things up?
No. Requesting indexing from the URL Inspection tool puts the page in the crawl queue, and repeating the request does not move it up. If weeks pass without indexing, look for a cause on the page itself.
Why does my site only show up when I search its name?
That means the site is indexed but does not rank for service keywords. At that point the problem has moved from indexing to content, competition and links.
Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.
