Search this question and you will get a dozen articles listing nine or eleven reasons a site might not appear. They are all roughly correct and all roughly useless, because a list does not tell you which one is yours.
The reasons are not equal and they are not parallel. Some of them make every other reason irrelevant — if Google has not stored your page, nothing about your content, your keywords or your backlinks matters at all. So the useful shape is a sequence: rule out the thing that would make everything else moot, then move down.
That is what this is. Five checks, in the order I run them on a client site, each one narrowing what it can still be.
First: which problem do you actually have?
In short: These get treated as the same complaint and they are not remotely the same problem. Almost everyone asking this question is in the right-hand column — but it is worth thirty seconds to be certain, because the left-hand column is cheap to fix and the right-hand one is not.
The diagnostic, in order
Run these in sequence — stop when one of them explains it
Is the page in Google at all?
Search site:yourdomain.com. Then search site:yourdomain.com/the-exact-page. Nothing returned means not indexed, and you can ignore everything anyone has told you about keywords until that is solved.
Search Console → Pages is the better version of this check. It splits every URL into indexed and not indexed, with Google’s own stated reason for each exclusion.
Are you telling Google to stay away?
View the page source and search for “noindex”. Then open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow lines. A noindex left on after a rebuild is the single most common cause of a site vanishing, and it is invisible to everyone except the person who checks.
WordPress has a Settings → Reading tick box that does this to the whole site. It is checked during development and forgotten at launch more often than anyone admits.
Can Google actually reach the content?
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and view the rendered HTML. If the words you expect are missing, the content is arriving via JavaScript that Google has not executed. Also check the canonical tag — a page canonicalised to a different URL is asking to be ignored.
Redirect chains and pages nothing links to belong here too. A page with no internal links pointing at it is a page Google has little reason to find or re-crawl.
Does the page target something people search for?
This is where most sites actually fail. The page is indexed, technically fine, and built around a phrase nobody types. A “chartered building consultancy” page will never be found by someone searching damp survey cost, because the page does not contain the search anywhere.
Search Console → Performance shows which queries you already appear for. It is the cheapest keyword research available and it is about your own site.
Is it simply outgunned, or too new?
If you have got this far, you are indexed, reachable and targeting real searches — and you are being beaten. Search your target term and look honestly at who is on page one. If it is national brands with hundreds of linking domains, the gap is authority and time, not a fault you can fix this week.
Age matters here in a way it does not above. A domain with no history takes months to be trusted with commercial terms, however good the page is.
The causes I actually find, ranked
Across the audits I run, the same handful account for nearly everything:
A noindex tag from a rebuild. The site was staged, the tag was correct on staging, and it shipped. Free to fix, and it can restore a site in a fortnight.
A migration that broke the redirects. New URLs, old links pointing nowhere. The pages exist, the authority does not reach them. This is the most expensive one to leave alone, because every week the old pages stay dead is authority draining away.
No page for the thing people search. Not a fault, an omission. The business sells a service that has real search demand and there is no page about it — the homepage is expected to do the work, and homepages are bad at specifics.
Content that only exists after JavaScript runs. Less common than it was, and still a reliable way to be invisible on a framework configured carelessly.
Nothing links to the page. Internally or externally. Google can technically reach it and has no reason to think it matters.
When you are indexed but still get no traffic
This is the majority case, and it deserves saying plainly: being on page six is functionally the same as not existing. Click-through rate collapses after the first few positions, and by the bottom of page two it rounds to zero. A site ranking 60th for a hundred terms has no traffic and looks, from the inside, exactly like a site Google has never heard of.
The difference is that the fix is known. You are not solving a mystery any more; you are closing a gap. That is a matter of building the page the search deserves, making it technically sound, and earning enough authority to be taken seriously — in that order, because the first two are within your control and the third is mostly a consequence of them.
What not to do
Do not resubmit the sitemap repeatedly. Once is enough. Asking again does not persuade Google of anything.
Do not buy links to fix an indexing problem. See above.
Do not rebuild the site because it “must be the platform”. It is almost never the platform. Rebuilding without diagnosing usually recreates the original fault on a new template, and now you have two problems and no baseline.
Do not judge it by searching your own name. You are signed in, you have visited the site, and Google knows it. Ranking for your own business name proves you are indexed and nothing else.
Common questions
Why is my website not showing up on Google at all?
Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. No results at all means the site is not indexed, and that is a different, more fixable problem than ranking badly. The usual causes are a noindex tag left on after a rebuild, a robots.txt blocking crawlers, a brand new domain Google has not got to yet, or a site built so that the content only appears after JavaScript runs.
How long does it take for a new website to appear on Google?
Days to a few weeks for a simple site once Google knows it exists, and much longer to rank for anything competitive. Submitting a sitemap in Search Console and asking for indexing on the important pages speeds up discovery. It does not speed up ranking, which is a separate problem people frequently conflate with this one.
Why does my website show up when I search the name but not for anything else?
Because your business name has almost no competition and your service terms have plenty. Ranking for your own name proves you are indexed — the site is findable and the technical foundation works. What is missing is a page built around what customers actually type, and enough authority to compete for it.
Why did my website disappear from Google?
Something changed. In rough order of likelihood: a rebuild reintroduced a noindex tag, a migration broke the redirects, the pages were consolidated or deleted, a core algorithm update moved the whole market, or in rare cases a manual action. Search Console will tell you which — the Pages report and the Manual Actions report between them cover almost every case.
Does my website need to be submitted to Google?
Not strictly. Google finds most sites on its own by following links. But submitting a sitemap in Search Console removes the wait and, more importantly, gives you the reporting that answers everything else on this page. It takes ten minutes and it is free.
Is my website not showing up because it is new?
Possibly, and this is the one cause you cannot fix by working harder. A new domain with no links takes months to be trusted with competitive terms. But being new does not stop you being indexed, so if site:yourdomain.com returns nothing, age is not your problem and something else is.