New Site Not Showing on Google? Six Usual Causes
Live for weeks, and searching your own business name returns nothing. Usually one of six causes, and four take minutes to check.
Why a new site stays invisible
Google has to find it, crawl it, and decide it is worth keeping. Any of those three can stall, and only one of them is a bug.
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The site goes live
It looks finished, the pages load, and as far as you are concerned it is open for business.
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Google never arrives
Nothing links to it, no sitemap was read, or a setting from development is quietly telling crawlers to stay away.
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The block gets found
Settings checked, crawler response tested, domain history reviewed, and a genuine reason for Google to visit put in place.
Your site has been live for weeks. You search your own business name and it is not there.
Not lower down. Not on page three. Simply absent.
This is one of the most alarming things that happens to a new site owner, and most of the time it is one of about six causes, four of which take minutes to check yourself.
The Honest Version: Sometimes You Just Have to Wait
New sites are slow, and that is normal
Google does not index a new site the day it appears. It has to find it, crawl it, and decide it is worth keeping. For a brand new domain with nothing linking to it, that regularly takes two to eight weeks.
If your site went live nine days ago, nothing is wrong. I will tell you that rather than take your money for waiting.
When waiting is the wrong answer
Past about six weeks with nothing indexed at all, something is usually blocking it rather than delaying it. Blocked and slow look identical from the outside, which is why people wait months on a problem that would have taken ten minutes to find.
The one that catches almost everyone
A setting that tells search engines to stay away, left switched on from when the site was being built.
It is the single most common cause, it is one checkbox, and it is invisible unless you go looking. I have seen sites sit completely invisible for over a year because of it while the owner paid for content every month and wondered why nothing happened.
Why nobody catches it
Because the site works perfectly. Every page loads, the design is finished, the forms work. Nothing about the experience of using your own site tells you that search engines have been asked to ignore it.
The Six Usual Causes
In rough order of how often they turn out to be the answer.
Search engines are blocked
A discourage-crawling setting, or a disallow rule left over from development. Costs nothing to fix and explains a large share of cases.
A noindex tag site-wide
Applied by a theme or a plugin during setup and never removed. The site is crawlable but is explicitly asking not to be kept.
Google does not know it exists
No sitemap submitted, no links from anywhere, and nothing to lead a crawler to you. New domains are not discovered automatically just because they exist.
It is simply too new
Under a few weeks old with no links pointing at it. Genuinely just waiting, and no service can meaningfully speed that up.
Search Console was never set up
You cannot see what is happening, so you assume the worst. Often the site is partly indexed already and nobody knew how to check.
The domain has history
Somebody used it before you and got it penalised. Rare, but it explains the cases where everything else looks completely correct.
What You Can Check Yourself First
Do these before paying anyone, including me. Two of them solve most cases, and all four are free.
1. Search for your own site directly
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If pages come back, you are indexed and your real problem is ranking, not indexing. That is a completely different job and this is the wrong page for it.
If nothing comes back at all, continue.
2. Check the search engine visibility setting
In WordPress it is under Settings, then Reading. There is a checkbox about discouraging search engines from indexing the site. If it is ticked, untick it and save.
That alone resolves a large share of cases. It gets switched on during development for good reasons and then forgotten at launch.
3. Look at your robots file
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see a line reading Disallow: / then everything is blocked. That one line is enough to keep an entire site out of Google indefinitely.
4. View the page source for noindex
Right click your homepage, choose view source, and search the text for noindex. If it appears inside a robots meta tag, that page is explicitly asking not to be indexed.
If all four come back clean and you are past six weeks, that is the point where it is worth having someone look properly.
What I Do Beyond the Obvious
1. Confirm what Google actually knows
Not what your plugin claims. What is in the index, what has been crawled and skipped, what has been discovered and never crawled, and whether your sitemap was ever read successfully rather than just submitted.
2. Test how the site responds to a crawler
Some sites serve something different to search engines than to browsers, usually by accident through caching, firewalls or security plugins. A page can look perfect in your browser and return an error to Googlebot, and you would never know.
3. Check the domain history
Whether the domain was registered and used before you bought it, what it was used for, and whether anything from that period is still attached. This is the cause nobody thinks to check, and it explains the otherwise inexplicable cases.
4. Give Google a reason to come
A working sitemap, internal linking that actually connects your pages, and at least a few genuine links from elsewhere on the web. New sites with two or three real links get indexed considerably faster than identical sites with none.
When You Do Not Need This
You launched under three weeks ago. Wait. Genuinely. There is nothing you can buy that makes Google move faster on a new domain.
The site: search returns pages. You are indexed. Your problem is that you are not ranking, which is a longer and completely different conversation.
One of the four self-checks found it. Then you have your answer for free, which is exactly why they are listed here rather than kept back.
Price and Turnaround
Scope |
Price |
Turnaround |
|---|---|---|
Diagnosis and fix, standard site |
$199 |
1 – 3 days |
Diagnosis plus indexing groundwork |
$399 |
1 week |
Complex or previously penalised domain |
From $599 |
1 – 2 weeks |
If it turns out to be one of the free checks above, I will tell you and there is nothing to pay. That happens more often than you would expect.
Common Questions
How long should a new site take to appear?
Two to eight weeks is normal for a brand new domain with no links. With a few genuine links pointing at it, often much faster.
Will submitting to Google speed it up?
Submitting a sitemap helps Google find you. It does not make Google decide faster once it has looked at your pages.
Do I need to pay for an indexing service?
No. Services promising fast indexing are usually doing nothing you could not do yourself, and some use methods that cause problems later.
My homepage is indexed but nothing else is.
A different and more common problem, usually internal linking or crawl budget rather than a site-wide block. Worth diagnosing separately.
Does a second-hand domain matter?
It can. If it was previously used for spam, that history follows the domain rather than the owner. Always worth checking before assuming.
Should I just start again on a new domain?
Almost never. Diagnose first. Starting over throws away whatever the site has built and usually repeats the same mistake on a new address.
Can I speed things up with social media links?
A little. They help Google discover you, though most are not followed. A single link from a real, indexed website is worth more.
Tried the free checks and still nothing?
Tell me your domain and roughly when it launched. I will tell you free whether you have a real problem or simply need to wait.
Or email info@shazzseo.com