Site not indexed
You built it. Google didn't come. Here's why that happens.
A site missing from Google is either invisible (never found), blocked (told to stay out — often by accident), or declined (found, judged, passed over). Each has different fingerprints, and site: search plus Search Console reveals which one you're living.
Same-day diagnosis. Flat quote before any fix.
What’s actually happening
Google finds pages by crawling links, then chooses what deserves the index. Absence therefore has three flavors: no crawlable path to you, an explicit keep-out instruction you probably don't know you're sending, or a crawl that happened and ended in 'discovered — currently not indexed,' Google's polite way of saying it wasn't persuaded.
The accidental keep-out is the most common and the most fixable: a 'discourage search engines' checkbox left from development, a noindex tag shipped in a theme, or a robots.txt still blocking everything since launch week. Sites run for months like this — visible to everyone except the one visitor that multiplies all others.
The usual causes, ranked
After twenty-seven years of these calls, the odds are well mapped. Start at the top.
The development-era noindex never got removed
WordPress's 'discourage search engines' checkbox, a staging robots.txt, or an SEO plugin set to noindex — launched into production and forgotten. The number-one cause by a distance.
robots.txt blocking the crawl
A Disallow: / — or a block on the CSS/JS Google needs to render — leaves crawlers reading your keep-out sign daily.
No crawlable paths or sitemap
New domains with zero backlinks and no submitted sitemap can simply wait in the discovery queue for a long time.
Quality below the indexing bar
Thin pages, duplicated manufacturer text, near-empty templates — crawled, considered, and left out. The fix is content, not configuration.
A penalty or hack aftermath
Rare but real: manual actions and post-infection removals. Search Console says so explicitly when it's this.
What you can safely try first
Nothing below can make things worse — that’s the selection criterion. Anything riskier belongs in professional hands, on a backup.
- 1
Run the site: search
Search site:yourdomain.com. Some pages showing means partial indexing — a quality or depth issue. Zero results means blocked or unknown — a configuration issue. This one query cuts the problem in half.
- 2
Check Search Console — or set it up
It's free and it's Google telling you directly: coverage, exclusion reasons, manual actions. 'Excluded by noindex tag' printed in a report beats any amount of guessing.
- 3
Look at the discourage checkbox and robots.txt
WordPress: Settings → Reading. Then yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Two minutes, and it's where the bodies usually are.
Stop and call when…
- Search Console reports a manual action or security issue
- Pages sit in 'Discovered — currently not indexed' for weeks — a quality verdict needing content work
- The blocks are clear but you can't safely change theme headers or server files
From there it’s our job: same-day look, flat quote, and the $229 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
Single Error Fix — buy it now, skip the hunt.
One error, hunted down and fixed — 500s, white screens, redirect loops, broken pages.
Covers one specific error or broken behavior on one site. Diagnosis, the fix, and a plain-English note on what happened. If we can't fix it, you get a full refund.
Questions we hear a lot.
How long does indexing take for a new site?
With a submitted sitemap and a handful of real backlinks, days to a few weeks for the first pages. Months of nothing isn't patience territory — it's one of the blocks above, and the checks take minutes.
I removed the noindex — when does Google come back?
Recrawl of an established site's key pages usually happens within days; the long tail takes weeks. Requesting indexing on priority URLs in Search Console genuinely helps. Rankings return with indexing, though positions may need re-earning if the block was long.
Why are some pages indexed and others not?
That's Google budgeting: it crawls what it finds and keeps what clears the bar. Unindexed pages are usually thin, duplicated, orphaned (no internal links), or explicitly excluded. The pattern in WHICH pages tells the story — and it's exactly what we read first.
Is 'get indexed fast' a service worth paying for?
Beware anyone promising instant indexing — that's not how the pipe works, and some tricks earn penalties. Legitimate: removing blocks, fixing structure, submitting properly, building real internal paths. That's what the flat fix covers, with the cause named in writing.
Related symptoms & help
Errors travel in packs. If this one visited, check its friends.
Flag down the only visitor that multiplies the rest.
Send the symptom, get a same-day look and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.