Why your website doesn't show up on Google

Has Google actually crawled your site?

Check by typing site:yourdomain.com into Google. If zero results appear, Google has not indexed a single page. This is the most common issue for new sites under 3 months old. Google discovers pages through sitemaps, backlinks, or direct submission.

Submit your sitemap at Google Search Console under Sitemaps. If your site is built with Next.js or a modern framework, the sitemap lives at /sitemap.xml by default. Verification takes 5 minutes and usually produces first crawl within 48 hours.

Is your robots.txt blocking search engines?

A single wrong line in robots.txt can block every bot from your entire site. The directive Disallow: / blocks everything. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm it does not start with that line for User-agent: *.

Also check your HTML head for `meta name="robots" content="noindex"`. Developers sometimes add this during staging and forget to remove it at launch. If present on production, Google will refuse to index even pages it has crawled.

Is your content thin or duplicated?

Google's Helpful Content system penalizes thin, low-value pages. Google has publicly stated there is no minimum word count, but pages that fail to satisfy search intent get filtered. If every page on your site has the same text with only the product name changed, Google treats them as duplicates and indexes one or none.

Each page needs enough unique, useful content to actually answer what it claims to. 300 to 600 words is a reasonable target for most pages, though Google cares about quality, not length. Answer what the page claims to answer. A page titled Services for Restaurants should have content about restaurants, not generic marketing copy.

Is your site too slow?

Google measures Core Web Vitals on every page: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Pages that fail these thresholds drop in ranking. Sites on cheap shared hosting routinely fail.

Test your site at pagespeed.web.dev. If your scores are below 70 on mobile, that is likely contributing to poor rankings. Fixes include image compression, removing unused JavaScript, and moving to faster hosting.

Does your site have backlinks?

Backlinks signal trust to Google. A brand new site with zero backlinks will take 3 to 6 months to rank for anything competitive. Listings in business directories, local chamber of commerce sites, and industry publications count.

Focus on 5 to 10 quality backlinks from relevant sources rather than hundreds of low-quality ones. Google penalizes link spam aggressively since the 2012 Penguin update.

Are you targeting impossible keywords?

A 6-month-old plumber site will not outrank 20-year-old national chains for the keyword plumber. Target long-tail keywords like emergency plumber Marseille 13008 instead. These have lower competition and higher conversion rates.

Is your website mobile-friendly?

Google announced mobile-first indexing for the whole web in March 2020 and completed the rollout in October 2023. It indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop. A site that looks great on laptop but breaks on phone will rank below competitors with responsive design, even if desktop content is identical.