Why Is My Website Not Appearing On Google?

This might be the home page, a services page, a product or any other page. If this page isn’t showing up where you want it to (page 1!) it’s either because Google doesn’t think the page deserves to rank, or that it’s not showing up at all because Google isn’t even aware it exists.

So, if you’re under the impression there is nothing wrong with your website, what is causing Google to think this?

Were you hoping to rank on the first page of the Google search results, but your website is nowhere to be found? Read more to find out why…

Lack of Backlinks

Whilst there are hundreds of factors that play into Google’s algorithm, it has been confirmed that the number of quality backlinks pointing to your website is really important. Backlinks are a very popular SEO tactic, and they are created when another website links to your page from theirs. Having a robust backlink profile indicates to Google that your site is credible, trustworthy and your content is high quality. If you are a site with 0 backlinks, Google will assume that you have very low domain authority therefore it is unlikely to find yourself ranking on page 1 of the SERP.

Whilst overloading your website with backlinks might seem like a quick and easy way to gain some authority, you need to be careful. Google is more intelligent than you think, and it can detect whether your links come from spammy sites or unrelated sites and will penalise you for this – the links need to be top quality and come from other websites which are highly relevant to your business industry. Google can also detect that if you suddenly get 300 new backlinks in a day, something suspicious is going on.

It is also worth noting that backlinks don’t just work for your entire website… The links will be targeting individual pages, so you need to consider which pages you want to be most visible and direct as many relevant links to those as possible.

Your Website Is Brand New

First of all, it takes time for Google to discover new websites and pages – it is not an instantaneous process! If you only just launched your brand-new site (particularly if it’s a new domain/URL), there is no need to worry about it ranking highly just yet. It can take up to 6 months to see real progress and increases in rankings. On the other hand, if you can’t find your website on Google at all, it might be worth running a search for it by pasting your URL after ‘site:’. For example, if you type in ‘site: xist2.com it will present a list of all our pages. If you have no pages showing here, you can always contact us and we would be happy to try and help.

Google Can’t Crawl or Index Your Website

As a final resort, it might be worth looking into whether you are blocking search engines from crawling or indexing your pages! There might be an accidental ‘noindex’ meta tag in your HTML code. Non-custom WordPress websites can add it to every page if you check the wrong box when setting up your site, or it could be a mistake that your developer has made after using the meta tag to prevent Google indexing the site during development and forgetting to remove it.

Equally, your website will have a robots.txt file, which tells search engines where they can and can’t go on your website. Google can’t crawl pages blocked in the file, so this tends to result in the not showing upon the SERP.

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If you would like to discuss your website design requirements, please get in touch. We are an Oxfordshire based web design agency, working with clients all over the country to deliver high impact website design services. Please email info@xist2.com or call 01993 835 117. We would be happy to discuss your needs.