Why Your Website Isn’t Showing In Search Results

By Laurence Williams | October 28, 2020

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

9/10 searches made online are made on Google.

If your website doesn’t appear on Google, see if any of these reasons might be why. ->

1. Your Site Is New

Type site:website.com (with your domain) in Google. If there aren’t results, you're not on Google’s radar. To solve this, create an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google through Google Search Console (GSC).

2. Pages Are Tagged Noindex

Pages with a “noindex” tag won’t be indexed by Google. In GSC, “inspect any URL” from your website to crawl for instances of noindex. Once corrected, have Google recrawl your site.

3. Blocked by robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages they can’t visit on your site. Check your robots.txt by going to website.com/robots.txt (using your domain). Disallow: / means you're blocking Google.

4. You’ve Been Removed by Google

Google can deindex a page as punishment. Penalties are unlikely, reserved for shady black-hat websites. As long as your practices are above-board, it’s unlikely that Google would punish you.

5. Keywords Are Too Competitive

High rankings are hard in areas with high competition for keywords. If your brand name isn’t distinct enough from another search intention, you might be outranked by words that make more contextual sense.

6. Too Few Backlinks

Whether new or old, your online presence and digital reputation needs to be established. The best way to do that is to build quality backlinks: links to your website on other websites related to your niche and industry.

Get On Google

For more information on how to resolve these issues and rank in search results, read the full blog.