Before you change anything, find out which of these two problems you actually have. They look identical from the outside and have nothing else in common.

Problem A: Google does not have your site. It is not in the index. It cannot rank for anything, because as far as the search engine is concerned it does not exist.

Problem B: Google has your site and is not showing it. It is indexed and ranking on page seven for things nobody searches for.

The two-minute test

Search Google for this, with your own domain:

site:yourdomain.com

That asks Google to list every page it holds for your site.

  • No results at all — Problem A. Your site is not indexed. Keep reading; the causes are below and they are all fixable.
  • Some results, but far fewer pages than your site has — a partial Problem A. Something is blocking part of the site.
  • All your pages are listed — Problem B. Google has everything and is choosing not to rank it. Skip to the second half of this page.

Problem A: Google cannot see your site

In rough order of how often each one turns out to be the answer.

1. The site is telling search engines to go away

This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and it is almost always an accident.

Websites are usually built somewhere private first, with search engines deliberately blocked so a half-finished site does not turn up in results. When the site launches, somebody has to un-tick that box. Frequently nobody does.

How to check: visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

…that is an instruction to every search engine to ignore the entire site.

There is a second version of the same mistake that robots.txt will not show you: a noindex instruction written into the pages themselves. On most website platforms both come from the same setting — in WordPress it is Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Un-tick it.

This one is worth checking first every time, because it explains the whole symptom, it takes thirty seconds, and the fix is one click.

2. The site is too new

A brand-new domain with no links pointing at it can take days or weeks to be found. If your site went live last Tuesday, this may be the entire story.

What to do: set up Google Search Console — it is free — verify the domain, and submit your sitemap. That is the difference between waiting to be discovered and telling Google directly. Search Console will also tell you, explicitly, if it tried to index a page and refused, and why. Everything below becomes much easier to diagnose once it is connected.

3. There is no sitemap, and nothing links to your pages

Search engines find pages by following links. A page that nothing links to and that appears in no sitemap is a page there is no route to.

This is why "orphan pages" go missing: a landing page built for a campaign, linked only from an advert, invisible to a crawler.

What to do: make sure you have a sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, and that every page you care about is reachable by clicking from your homepage.

4. The pages need JavaScript to show any content

If your site is built so that the page arrives essentially empty and JavaScript fills it in, search engines have to run that code before they see anything. They do — but later, less reliably, and not for every page.

How to check: view the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is not in the source, the content is being added afterwards.

What to do: this is a developer conversation about server-side rendering. Worth raising, not worth panicking about — it degrades indexing rather than preventing it.

5. Two versions of the site are competing

Your site may be reachable at four addresses: with and without www, over http and https. If all four serve the site rather than redirecting to one, search engines see four copies and split the credit.

What to do: pick one, and make the other three redirect to it permanently.

6. There is a manual penalty

Rare, but it happens — usually to sites that bought links, or to a domain with a history you inherited when you bought it. Search Console tells you outright under Security & Manual Actions. If there is nothing there, this is not your problem.

Problem B: Google has your site but will not rank it

Different problem entirely. Nothing is broken; you are being outranked.

You are searching for something you were never going to win

A local plumber is not going to rank for "plumber". They can absolutely rank for "emergency plumber Kingston" or "boiler repair Kingston upon Thames". Broad single words are contested by national businesses with twenty years of history.

What to do: search the way your customers would — the specific phrase, with the place name. If you rank there, the site works and the problem was the query.

Your pages do not say what they are about

A page titled "Home" and headed "Welcome to our website" has told a search engine nothing. It is competing for the word "welcome".

What to do: every page needs a title, a heading and an opening paragraph containing the words a customer would actually type. Not stuffed — just present. "Emergency plumber in Kingston, available 24 hours" is a heading. "Welcome" is not.

There is not enough on the page

A service page with two sentences has nothing to rank. It does not need two thousand words — it needs to genuinely answer the question: what the service is, what it costs, how long it takes, what happens next.

Nobody links to you

Links from other sites remain one of the strongest signals there is. A new site with no links is starting from nothing regardless of how good the pages are.

Where to start: your local chamber of commerce, trade bodies you belong to, suppliers who list stockists, local press, the sponsor page of anything you sponsor. Real listings from real organisations. Not bought links, which are the thing that earns the manual penalty above.

You have not claimed your Google Business Profile

For anything local this is often bigger than the website. The map results sit above the ordinary ones, and they are driven by a Business Profile, not by your site. It is free.

The order to work through this

  1. Run the site: search. It tells you which problem you have.
  2. If nothing is indexed, check robots.txt and your platform's "discourage search engines" setting. This is the answer more often than everything else combined.
  3. Connect Google Search Console and submit a sitemap. Free, and it turns guesswork into a report.
  4. If the site is indexed, search the specific phrases a customer would use before concluding anything is wrong.
  5. Then fix titles, headings and thin pages — in that order.

The most common outcome, by a distance, is a single setting on step two. Check it first.