Reasons Why Your Site May Be Invisible to Google: Cause #1

Updated: December 7, 2016

Our main goal here at SEO Advantage is for all our clients to consistently appear at the top of Page 1 in Google and all other search engines.

When a new client approaches us, the problem is usually that their site is displaying behind their competitors when searching for specific keywords – or maybe their site is not displaying on the search results for certain key terms.

But over the years, we’ve run into several cases where a certain site is not appearing in search results at all.

Why is that? This is the answer we’ll seek to answer in this blog series.

First, a quick overview of the five reasons behind why a website may not show up in Google Search Results:

1. The site is too new and Google hasn’t had the chance to crawl it yet
2. The site content isn’t optimized for search engines
3. The site has “no index” tags.
4. The target keyword market is too competitive
5. The site has been penalized by Google

Let’s tackle this problem together by starting with the easiest things to check/fix: Your site is too new to be in Google.

“How long until my site displays in the Google results?”

It can take Google anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or longer to display your site. When you run a search in Google, you’re not searching the whole internet, but rather searching Google’s index of the web.

Software programs called “googlebots” (or “bots”, “robots”, “spiders”, etc.) start by fetching a few pages and following links to other pages, then following links they point to and so on. That’s why if your website doesn’t have any “inbound links” (meaning links coming from another website), it might take a bit longer for your site to be crawled.

“How can I test if my site has been crawled by Google?”

It can be tempting to search for your URL right in the Google search box, but the results you’ll get by simply entering my-website-url.com into Google can be confusing. There’s a good chance most might not relate to your site at all.

The easiest way to tell if your site is already indexed by Google is to run a search using the “site:” operator, followed by your URL, like this: site:my-website-url.com. (Make sure there are no spaces between the operator and the URL.)

If there are any pages already indexed by Google, you should see them here. If you don’t, well, you can wait a few more days for your site to be indexed or you can take matters into your own hands.

“How do I manually index my website in Google?”

Ideally, you would want to create a Google Webmaster Tools account to take advantage of all the information and tools you need to monitor the overall health of your website and to diagnose/troubleshoot any potential problems.

If you don’t want to do that just yet, you can simply visit this link and submit your URL to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/.

While Google doesn’t add all submitted URLs to its index, and there’s no way to know when (or even if) a manually submitted site will appear in the results, this is a good place to start.

Are you still having trouble getting your site to show up in the search result? In my next post, I’ll talk about websites that do not display in Google due to content that isn’t properly optimized, so stay tuned!