If your website does not appear in Google at all, the cause is almost always one of six things. Work through them in this order, because the first two account for most cases and take about two minutes each to check.
1. Google has not indexed the site yet
Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google. If nothing comes back, the site is not indexed and no amount of optimization will help until that changes.
2. A robots.txt rule is blocking crawlers
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the entire site. This happens most often when a staging setting survives a launch.
The rest of the checklist
- A noindex tag left on the page after launch
- No internal links pointing at the page, leaving it orphaned
- Thin content that Google has crawled but chosen not to index
- A manual action, visible in Search Console under Security and Manual Actions
Ranking poorly and not appearing at all are different problems with different fixes. Confirm which one you have before spending money on either.
