Why you cannot find your own website on Google

In the Google search box, type this, with your own address and no space after the colon:

site:yourbusiness.com

That asks Google a very specific question: show me every page you hold from this website.

If you get results back, Google knows your site. It has read your pages and they are in its list. Your problem is that it is showing other things first. Skip to the second half of this page.

If you get nothing at all, Google does not have your website. It is not ranking you badly. It has never put you on the list in the first place. That is a technical problem, and the good news is that technical problems have causes you can find and fix, usually in days.

Do that search before anything else. It is the difference between a week of useful work and a month of guessing.

Five reasons, roughly in the order they turn out to be the answer.

One. The site is simply too new.

Google has to come and read your site before it can list it, and for a brand new address with nothing linking to it, that can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks.

There is nothing wrong. There is nothing to fix. If your site went live last week, this is almost certainly it, and the only thing worth doing is the Search Console step further down.

Two. Somebody left the "keep Google away" switch on.

Every website builder has a setting that hides the site from search engines. It exists so that a half built site does not get indexed while it is still full of placeholder text. WordPress spells it out in plain English: "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Wix, Squarespace and Shopify all have their own version.

It gets switched on during the build, on purpose, by a careful person. Then the site launches and nobody switches it back off.

This is the most common preventable cause there is, and it is a single checkbox. Go and look at it today, whatever else you do.

Three. Google picked a different version of your address.

This one is almost never explained to owners and it catches a lot of people.

yourbusiness.com and www.yourbusiness.com look identical to you. To Google they are two addresses that happen to show the same pages. When Google finds the same content at two addresses, it treats them as copies, picks one to be the real one, and ignores the other.

If it picked the version you never use, you can search for months and find nothing, while the site sits happily in Google under the other spelling.

The real trap is what happens when your site changed recently. Google may still be holding the old version of the copy it picked, which means it shows the world a site you replaced.

Four. The robots file is telling Google not to bother.

There is a small text file on every site called robots.txt, which tells search engines which parts they may read. A line in the wrong place can wave Google off the whole site.

You can look at yours right now. Type your address followed by /robots.txt. If you see the word Disallow: followed by a single /, that is a problem and worth asking about.

Five. Your pages are built in a way Google struggles with.

Some sites deliver an empty page and then fill it in with code once it loads. Google can usually handle it, but not always, and not quickly. If your site was built as a web app rather than a website, this is worth asking about specifically.

Different problem. Nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing in a hurry.

You are competing with directories. Search your business name and you may find Yelp, Justdial, Facebook or a trade directory sitting above you. Those sites are enormous and Google trusts them. For your own name you should win eventually, but "eventually" can mean months on a new site.

Your name is a common word. If your business is called Apex or Summit or Prime, you are competing with everybody else who thought that too. Add your town to the search and see if you appear. If you do, you are fine, and your name is the problem rather than your website.

Your Google Business Profile is doing the work instead. Many local searches show the map listing rather than the website. Check whether the map result is there even when the website is not. If it is, customers are finding you, just not the way you expected.

Your pages do not contain the words people search for. If your home page says "Welcome to our website" and "Excellence since 2009" but never says "emergency plumber in Denver", Google has nothing to match. This is the most fixable thing on this list and it does not need a developer.

Everything above is you guessing from the outside. Google will tell you the real answer for free, and almost no small business owner knows it exists.

Set up Google Search Console. It is free, it is Google's own tool, and it takes about fifteen minutes. Pick the URL prefix option and verify with the HTML tag method.

Then use URL Inspection. Paste in your home page address and Google tells you, in a sentence, whether that page is on Google and if not, why not.

Some of what it says is not written for normal humans, so here is the translation for the messages you are most likely to get:

"URL is on Google" means you are in. Your problem is the second half of this page, not the first.

"Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the page exists but has not got around to reading it. Usually a new or small site. Wait, and ask for indexing.

"Crawled, currently not indexed" means Google read it and chose not to list it. Usually thin pages, or a page that says much the same as another one of yours.

"Excluded by noindex tag" means your site is actively telling Google to stay away. That is cause number two above. Go and find the switch.

"Duplicate without user-selected canonical" means Google found the same page at more than one address and picked one for you. Below that message it tells you which one it picked. If that is not the address you expected, you have found your problem. That is cause number three, and it is the one most people never get to the bottom of.

While you are in there, use Request Indexing on your home page, and submit your sitemap under the Sitemaps section. Neither is instant. Both put you in a queue that is measured in days rather than months.

An owner posted a thread titled "My Site Won't Show on Google (Even by Name) After Months, Tried Everything". Inside it:

"My Shopify store is completely missing from Google Search, even when I type the exact name, it doesn't show up anywhere."

By the time she wrote that, she had submitted sitemaps, changed her theme, and bought backlinks.

None of those address any of the five causes above. Changing the theme rebuilds the shop front while the door is still locked. Bought links are worse than useless and can do real harm.

The two replies she got were "there are a lot of results with similar names" and "please give it some time and rest assured". She had already given it months.

So: do not buy links, do not rebuild the site, and do not start again from scratch. All three are expensive ways of avoiding the ten second search at the top of this page.

Notice too what nobody asked her. Nobody asked what Search Console said. That would have answered it in a minute.

If the keep away switch was on: turn it off, request indexing, and you are usually back within a few days.

If Google picked the wrong version of your address: fixing it is quick, but Google then has to come back and change its mind, which takes days to a couple of weeks. Do not judge it the next morning.

If the site is just new: a few weeks, and there is no shortcut worth paying for.

If you are indexed but outranked: months, and it is about what your pages actually say rather than anything technical.

Whichever one you are in, the honest advice is the same. Do the site: search, set up Search Console, read what it tells you, and resist the urge to change five things at once. If you change five things and it improves, you have learned nothing about which one mattered.