Nowadays it is necessary to have a website, but it is important that it appears in search engines, otherwise it is as if it wouldn’t exist.
Some of the reasons why your website does not appear in search engines may be the following:
1. Google has not yet indexed your website because it is new
The fastest way to let Google know that your website exists is to add the sitemap to Google Search Console.
- First you have to create the sitemap with the SEO plugin you use, Yoast, Rank Math…
- Second go to Google Search Console:
- Create an account.
- Verify your domain.
- Upload the sitemap.
To view the sitemap type in the browser: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
2. Your website or any page is in “noindex”.
If your website is in noindex it will not be indexed by Google. If you use WordPress check that the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not checked. You can see it in: Tools – Settings – Reading.
Check if a page or the web is in “noindex”.
Viewing the source code of your page and doing Control+F (if you use Mac is Command+F), look for the word “noindex”, if nothing appears, is that you have not made a noindex of your page.
Make sure you have not set another page as the canonical version.
A “rel=canonical” tells the search engine that this is not the original content and not to index it, but to index the “canonical” url.
You can add or modify canonical tags in WordPress from the SEO plugin you use, Yoast, Rank Math or any other.
3. You blocked Googlebot in your robots.txt file
The robots.txt file tells crawlers which pages it can and cannot crawl on your site.
Check your robots.txt file to see if you accidentally blocked a page you want to appear in Google.
To view the robots.txt type on your browser: yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
4. Your website has been penalized and Google has deindexed it
Search on Google “site:yourdomain.com”.
If your website used to appear in search results and is no longer appearing, you may have been penalized and Google has de-indexed your site.
Go to Google Search Console and check if you have received a notification about a penalty. Google usually informs you when a website has been penalized.
Some of the reasons may be if wrong things have been done, such as scraping, spam links or if the site has been hacked.
Usually Google removes penalties, but if it’s something big like spam links, it may not be so simple.
5. Your website is not optimized for SEO
It is possible that Google is not considering your website relevant enough to display it.
To improve the optimization of your website it is advisable to do a SEO audit of your website and fix things like:
- The keywords are included
- The page loads fast
- There are no broken links or error pages
- Validate the HTML code correctly
- View web statistics
- There is quality content, without duplication and including keywords
- Etc.
In the post on how to write content you can learn how to write articles for your website. In any case, it would be advisable to do a SEO audit of your website, to detect the reasons that may be affecting the visibility in Google.
Conclusion
Some of the reasons why your website does not appear in Google may be that your website is new and has not yet been indexed in search engines, it is in “no-index”, there is a blockage in robots.txt, a Google penalty or simply your website is not well optimized for SEO. Be patient because being in the top positions in search engines requires time and effort.