You searched your own business name, or something you sell, and your site was not there. It is a bad feeling, and the advice you find next is usually a checklist of twenty things written by somebody who has never seen your site.
First, separate two problems
Not showing up describes two situations with almost nothing in common. Either Google does not have your pages at all, or it has them and is choosing not to show them for the thing you searched. The fixes are unrelated, so guessing between them wastes weeks.
The two-minute check
- Search for site:yourdomain.com in Google, with no space after the colon. This asks Google to list only pages it holds from your site.
- Pages come back: Google has you. Your problem is the second half of this post, and it is the harder one.
- Nothing comes back: Google does not have you, which is the indexing problem below.
- For a real answer rather than an estimate, open Google Search Console and run URL Inspection on one page. It states outright whether that page is indexed, when it was last crawled, and which address Google treats as the original.
Why Google might not have your pages
- A noindex tag. One line of code telling search engines to stay away. It gets left behind after a redesign more often than anyone admits.
- A blocked robots.txt file. Same idea, applied to whole sections of the site.
- Your site builder is hiding it. Squarespace, Wix and Shopify all have a setting that keeps a site out of search while it is being built, and sites get launched with it still switched on.
- Duplicate addresses with no canonical tag. If the same page answers at more than one address and nothing says which is the real one, Google has to guess, and sometimes it declines to pick.
- Broken or looping redirects, which quietly strand pages nobody can reach.
- Content that only appears after JavaScript runs. Google can handle it, but it is slower and less reliable than serving the words in the page.
- Nothing links to the page, including your own menu and sitemap. An unlinked page is an unfindable page.
- The site is new. This one is not a fault, and it is covered further down.
What this looked like on my own site
I launched this site on 10 August 2026. Sixteen pages, sitemap submitted the same week. Here is the whole timeline, including the part I got wrong.
Within days, Search Console flagged the homepage with “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”. Two causes, both mine. The pages carried no canonical tag at all, so Google had nothing telling it which address was the real one. And the insecure http version of the site was still answering normally with identical content, so from Google’s side there were two working copies of every page.
The fix was two changes and took an afternoon. A canonical tag on every page pointing at its own secure address, and a redirect so http sends people to https instead of serving a second copy.
Separately, three pages sat in “Discovered - currently not indexed” for a couple of weeks. I did nothing about those. They resolved on their own.
Five weeks after launch, all sixteen pages come back “Submitted and indexed” when inspected one at a time in Search Console. Zero failures. The sitemap reports zero errors and zero warnings. Google is still recrawling steadily: the about page on 31 August, a service page on 11 September, the homepage on 12 September, another service page on 13 September.
“Discovered - currently not indexed” is not an error
This phrase causes more panic than anything else in Search Console, and it is usually nothing. It means Google knows the page exists and has not got around to it. On a new site with no reputation, that is the normal queue, not a rejection.
The one to take seriously is its neighbour, “Crawled - currently not indexed”. That means Google came, read the page, and decided against it. That is a content judgement, and no technical fix addresses it.
How long it should take
Nobody can give you a guaranteed timeframe, and anyone who does is guessing. On my site indexing started within days and the last stragglers took about five weeks. That is one small site, so treat it as a shape rather than a promise.
What you can do is ask directly. In Search Console, inspect the URL and request indexing. It is a nudge, not a command, and requesting the same page repeatedly does not make it arrive sooner.
What does not help
- Submitting your site to hundreds of directories. Google has not needed a submission form for two decades.
- Paid instant indexing services. At best they do what the free button in Search Console does.
- Repacking the same page with more keywords. If the page is not indexed, the words on it are not the problem.
- Rebuilding the whole site. Check the settings above before anyone quotes you for a rebuild.
Check the three most common blockers yourself
- Open the page, view source, and search the code for noindex. If it appears in a robots meta tag, that is your answer, and it is a one-line fix.
- Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / closes the entire site to search engines.
- In your site builder, find the search engine visibility or privacy setting and confirm it is on. Squarespace, Wix and Shopify each keep it in a different menu, and each does the same thing.
Those three account for most cases where a finished site is genuinely missing, and all three take a minute to rule out before anyone quotes you for a rebuild.
What the other Search Console statuses mean
The Pages report lists reasons, and most of them alarm people unnecessarily. In plain terms:
- Excluded by noindex tag: the page is telling Google to stay away. Either deliberate, or left over from a build.
- Blocked by robots.txt: you told Google not to crawl it at all.
- Page with redirect: this address forwards elsewhere, so Google indexes the destination instead. Normal.
- Alternate page with proper canonical tag: a duplicate that correctly points at the original. Normal, and often the biggest group in the list.
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Google found more than one copy and you never said which was real. This is the one I had.
- Soft 404: the page loads, but it reads as empty or broken to Google.
- Crawled - currently not indexed: Google read it and passed. A content judgement, not a setting.
Most of that list is housekeeping rather than damage. Two are genuinely yours to fix: a noindex you did not intend, and duplicates with no canonical.
The second problem: indexed, and still invisible
This is the one most people actually have, and it gets almost no honest coverage, so here are my own numbers. Every page indexed, a site that loads fast, clean structure throughout. This is how often it was shown in search results per week after launch.
- Week of 10 August: shown 41 times.
- Week of 17 August: 50.
- Week of 24 August: 39.
- Week of 31 August: 14.
- Week of 7 September: 14.
Fully indexed, and fourteen appearances in a week. New sites often get a short burst of visibility while Google works out what they are, and then settle back to what they have earned. Mine did exactly that.
Being indexed means you are allowed to compete. It does not mean anybody has a reason to pick you.
If your pages are indexed and nothing is happening, your problem is not technical, and no checklist fixes it. It is that nothing on the web vouches for you yet: no links, no mentions, no reviews, no history. That takes months, and it is the actual work.
What to do next
Run the two-minute check. If Google does not have your pages, work down the list above, because it is almost always one of those eight. If Google does have them, stop optimising and start earning reasons to be mentioned.
If you are commissioning a new site, most of this is settled at build time rather than fixed afterwards: do you need SEO with a new website.
Every figure in this post is from RareStudio’s own Google Search Console account, covering 10 August to 16 September 2026. It is one small site and not a benchmark.