Website Not Showing on Google? How to Fix It

You built a website, but searching for it on Google shows nothing. This is one of the most common problems site owners face, and it almost always has one of a few specific causes. Work through this checklist in order.

Step 1: Check if Google knows your site exists

Search for your site with the site: operator:

site:yourdomain.com

If results appear, your site is indexed and your problem is ranking, not indexing. If nothing appears, Google has not indexed you yet, continue below.

Step 2: Set up Google Search Console

Search Console is free and shows exactly how Google sees your site: which pages are indexed, which have errors, and what queries people used. Verify your domain, then submit your sitemap:

# Your sitemap usually lives at:
https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

# Next.js App Router: generate it with app/sitemap.ts
export default function sitemap() {
  return [
    { url: 'https://yourdomain.com', lastModified: new Date() },
    { url: 'https://yourdomain.com/about', lastModified: new Date() },
  ]
}

Step 3: Check for a noindex tag

Development settings often survive into production. View your page source and search for noindex:

<!-- If you find this, Google is being told to ignore the page -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

# Also check robots.txt is not blocking everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /        <- this blocks your whole site

Step 4: Check your canonical domain

If www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com both work but are not redirected to one version, Google may pick the wrong one as canonical. I hit exactly this on my own site: Google chose a www version I did not control. One 308 redirect fixed it. Pick one version and redirect the other to it permanently.

Step 5: Give Google pages and links to crawl

• One page per topic you want to rank for, with a clear, unique title tag
• Internal links: every page reachable from another page, not hidden behind buttons or scripts
• For key pages, use Request Indexing in Search Console to speed things up

How long it takes

New sites take from a few days to a few weeks to appear. After fixing the issues above, expect movement within 1 to 2 weeks. Ranking well takes longer, but appearing at all should not.