1. Google Search Console if you are a verified owner
There is no better tool than Google to check your website’s performance and stats. If you are a website owner, I highly recommend using the Google Search Console tool to check your website’s ranking, indexing, impressions, and technical issues.
You can find the rankings data in the “Performance” report. Note, you can see the rankings, impressions, clicks, and CTR (click-through rate) for a particular country. How cool is that?
The screenshot below is taken from my Google Search Console account. Despite Self Made Millennials being a young website, its impressions and positions are growing.
reasons why your website does not show up in Google search
It might happen that Google does not display your website in search despite all your efforts. I know how painful and upsetting it might be. Many new websites experience it, and my website was not an exception.
Before you start thinking of “how does my website rank on Googe,” and “how to get my website on Google,” check if your website has any of these issues.
1. No index. No follow
During my marketing internship, one of the first tasks was to discover why the company job page was not on Google.
The company I worked at redesigned its job page and hoped to get new applicants soon. However, no one was coming to that page from organic search, and it looked suspicious.
I had no marketing experience and access to expensive tools to run an SEO audit back then. So, I looked for answers online. I stumbled upon a tiny issue that might have adverse consequences if not tackled — no index, no follow tag.
A no index, no follow tag tells the Google bot that a particular page should be skipped from crawling.
If a new page is under maintenance, web developers use a no index, no follow tag to prevent Google from indexing it. However, they might forget to remove this tag upon a new page release. This is why a new job page was not discovered and indexed by Google in my case.
How long does it take for your website to show up on Google search? From a few hours to weeks. However, if your web pages (or even the whole website) contain a no index, no follow tag, the Google bot won’t crawl and add your website to the main index.
You can quickly find this tag by doing a Cltr+F search on a target website. If the following code is on a page that should be on Google, ask your developer to remove it.
2. Messed up robots.txt
Even though a robots.txt file is not mandatory, according to Google, it serves an essential function for a website.
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct search engine bots on how to crawl website pages. The syntax is not easy to grasp for an average user. Therefore, it’s easy to mess up with the code.
Particular website categories or pages are recommended for disallowing, but not the whole website.
If you have the following line of code in your robots.txt file, your entire website won’t be crawled by the Google bot.
Fixing this problem will help you open your website for indexing.
3. Discovered/Crawled — not indexed
You might experience one more issue after the new website release: discovered/crawled — not indexed.
You can only check this issue in Google Search Console, but the outcome is the same — your website pages won’t be on Google.It does not matter if you have an established website with a high domain rank or a brand new website; it can happen to anyone. I faced many of these issues when working on a reputable UX agency website and publishing content on my WordPress website.
Google gives the following explanation to these issues:
“Crawled – currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.
Discovered – currently not indexed: The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL, but this was expected to overload the site; therefore, Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.”
In simple words, Google knows about a page, but it decided not to add it to its main index because of some issues.
Google does not give the answer to what causes these issues and how to fix them. As a marketer, I have some guesses to explain the reasons behind these issues. Pages with poor mobile usability, low loading speed, and poor content quality might have these issues. Besides, if Google believes a brand new website has no value for users, it might be excluded from indexing too.
I had to rewrite the affected pages to fix the problem, add new content, link to reputable sources, reduce the loading speed, and resubmit pages for reindexing.
If you experience similar issues, pay attention to Google Search Console signals. Improving your website’s technical performance might help you solve the problem (verified based on my experience).
How much time is required to get a Google page ranking — case study
“How does Google rank websites?” “How long does SEO take?” And “how long does it take for Google to update search results?” are among popular questions people ask before launching their websites. They want to know their time and energy won’t be wasted, and a website can become a passive income source over time.
I’ve worked for three years as a marketer before launching the Self Made Millennials website. In short, I wanted to share my professional and life experience with like-minded people who want to become self-sustainable.
If you wonder how long it takes to make a website like mine, I’ll tell you — a few weeks. I mapped the website structure, wrote a copy, researched the WordPress template, and paid a bit more than $200 for the WordPress template and set up.
I launched my website in July 2021. It was a clean and simple website with a few pages back then. I wanted to redesign it badly, but I remembered a lesson I learned as a marketer: the primary goal of any new website is to grow.
You may have a fascinating website, but who cares if no one can discover it. I focused on the following areas of workto grow my website:
- Publishing at least two optimized and high-quality blog posts every month.
- Fixing the technical issues.
- Making sure my website’s impressions are increasing.
- Building awareness on Medium and Quora.
I achieved 1k+ monthly traffic by January 2022 and the following rapid growth of impressions:
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