Why is your website not showing on Google, and what to check

Run four checks in this order. Ask Google whether the exact page is indexed. Read the Page indexing report in Search Console. Look for a noindex rule on the page and in the response headers. Read the live robots file. Each check has a Google help page behind it, and none of them needs code.

Open your own address in a browser first. A site that will not load, because the domain lapsed or the hosting stopped, cannot show on Google, and no check below will tell you that. Two of those checks need a Search Console login for the site. Two do not. Every section below says which, because you may not have built the site and may not be able to get into anything. We sell website builds and monthly management, so treat the last two sections as us selling. The first seven need nothing from us.

Is your page in Google’s index at all?

The URL Inspection tool answers it, and it works only inside the property that owns the page. Google calls it a tool that provides “information about Google’s indexed version of a specific page”, then sets the limit: “The URL must be in the currently opened property” (Google’s help page for the URL Inspection tool, checked 5 September 2026).

If you do not hold that property, Google sends you to “the appropriate non-owner test, such as the Rich Results test or AMP test”. Neither is the indexing check.

The check anyone can run is to search Google for the full address of the page. Google’s starter guide describes it: “Try searching on Google for your site with the site: search operator. If you see results pointing to your site, you’re in the index.” (Google’s SEO starter guide, checked 5 September 2026). Treat that as a first look rather than a ruling. Google’s own wording there covers whether your site is in the index, not whether one exact page is. The URL Inspection tool is the check Google publishes for a single page.

Search your own address like this. Run the first line for the whole site and the second for the missing page.

site:yourdomain.co.uk
site:yourdomain.co.uk/the-page-you-cannot-find/

Results on the first line mean something on the domain is in the index. An empty first line, or an empty second line, is a reason to run the checks below rather than a ruling on that one page.

When you hold the property and have fixed the fault, the same tool takes a request to index the page again, and Google attaches no promise to it: “Submitting a request does not guarantee that the page will appear in the Google Index” (the URL Inspection tool on requesting indexing, checked 5 September 2026).

What does the Page indexing report say about your pages?

The report sorts every address Google knows about on your site into the pages it indexed and the pages it left out, and prints Google’s own reason for each exclusion (Google’s Page indexing report help page, checked 5 September 2026). You reach it inside the property for your site, which is the second check here that needs a login.

Three of its reasons answer this question outright. Google defines “URL blocked by robots.txt” as “This page was blocked by your site’s robots.txt file”, and “URL marked ‘noindex’” as “When Google tried to index the page it encountered a ‘noindex’ directive and therefore did not index it”. A third catches redirected pages: “This is a non-canonical URL that redirects to another page. As such, this URL will not be indexed.” Two more reasons are faults, not choices: on the same help page, checked 5 September 2026, “Not found (404)” means “This page returned a 404 error when requested”, and “Server error (5xx)” means “Your server returned a 500-level error when the page was requested”. Match the label on your screen against those before you read anything into it.

If the page used to show and no longer does, look at a rebuild: a noindex rule or a robots block added during one takes a page that used to show straight back out. The redirect reason catches the other case, a page moved during the rebuild rather than blocked.

What the report will not give you is a date for your page. Google’s starter guide says “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months” (the same starter guide, on how long changes take, checked 5 September 2026). More on that in where a monthly search budget goes, and how long Google says changes take.

Does crawled, currently not indexed mean Google has judged your page?

No. Google defines it as a processing state, not a verdict on the writing. The Page indexing report gives “Crawled - currently not indexed” as “The page was crawled by Google but not indexed”, and adds “It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling” (Google’s definitions of each indexing state, checked 5 September 2026).

The neighbouring label sits one step earlier. “Discovered - currently not indexed” means “The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet”. So Google has never read that page at all. Both labels live in the Page indexing report, so you are still inside the property to read them.

If someone quotes you for a rewrite off the back of that label, ask them which of Google’s two states your page is in. A rewrite does not change the reason Google gave. A page never crawled is a discovery question, and the sitemap section below is where that gets fixed. Where Google has crawled the page and left it out, the question is what is on it.

Is a noindex rule sitting on the page or in the response headers?

This check needs no account, like the search you ran at the top. A noindex rule takes a page out of Google completely, and Google states the effect: “When Googlebot crawls that page and extracts the tag or header, Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it” (Google’s page about blocking indexing with noindex, checked 5 September 2026).

It hides in two places. The first is a robots meta tag in the head of the page, carrying the word noindex. Open the page, view the source, and search it for the word noindex. The second is a response header named X-Robots-Tag, which carries the same word and never shows in the page source. Ask whoever hosts the site whether the page sends that header, or read it yourself in the response headers your browser shows for the page.

One caveat travels with both, and the robots section below explains it. Google writes: “For the noindex rule to be effective, the page or resource must not be blocked by a robots.txt file, and it has to be otherwise accessible to the crawler. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file or the crawler can’t access the page, the crawler will never see the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results, for example if other pages link to it.” The awkward case is a page blocked in robots that also carries a noindex rule: the crawler never reaches it, so it never sees the rule.

Is the robots file stopping the crawler before it reads anything?

Open your own address with /robots.txt on the end and read what comes back. Anyone can do this, no login. The file counts only where Google looks for it: “You must place the robots.txt file in the top-level directory of a site, on a supported protocol” (Google’s robots.txt specification, checked 5 September 2026). Google reads no copy kept anywhere else.

Read the file at your own web address. A host can serve Google a different one. The line to look for is a Disallow line under the group that applies to Googlebot, and a lone Disallow: / blocks the whole site. If that address returns a not-found page, there is no robots file at all: Google’s crawlers “treat all 4xx errors, except 429, as if a valid robots.txt file didn’t exist”.

One rule inside that file trips people who have done nothing wrong. Google’s specification states “User agent specific groups and global groups (*) are not combined”. Name one crawler in a block of its own and that crawler stops reading the general block, so a rule you thought applied to everything applies to everyone except the bot you named. If you find a block that names one crawler, ask whoever wrote the file why that block does not repeat the general rules.

A blocked page can still show up, with no description under it. Google says “Google can’t index the content of pages which are disallowed for crawling, but it may still index the URL and show it in search results without a snippet”. Where you see that, open this file before you open the page.

Google’s specification says “other fields such as crawl-delay aren’t supported”, so a crawl-delay line changes nothing for Google. If you do not recognise what is written in the file, ask whoever hosts the site who writes it.

Has a sitemap been submitted, and does it list the pages you care about?

A sitemap is the list of addresses you are asking Google to read. Google’s steps are to post the sitemap on your site, test that it is available to Google, then paste its address “into the Add a new sitemap box in the Sitemaps report, then click Submit” (Google’s Sitemaps report help page, checked 5 September 2026). You cannot submit a sitemap from outside the property, so this one waits until you have access.

Submitting a sitemap carries no commitment from Google. The same page says “There is no guarantee that a page URL discovered in a sitemap has been or will be crawled or indexed by Google”. Read two things in the file: whether the missing page is listed, and whether its addresses match the ones that actually load, slash for slash.

Check that every page you care about is linked from somewhere a visitor can click.

My page is on Google but nobody finds it. Is that the same problem?

No. The two are different faults. Not indexed means the page cannot appear at all, which Google states: “URL is not on Google means that the URL can’t appear in Search results” (what Google means by not on Google, checked 5 September 2026). A page that is indexed but buried is already eligible to show, and nothing above will move it.

Search Console draws the line for you: the report lists indexed pages separately from the pages it left out (how the Page indexing report splits indexed from not indexed, checked 5 September 2026). Before you decide which side you are on, search the full address of the page, not your business name. A name search answers a ranking question. Only the address answers the indexing one. Reading the split needs the property. Searching your own address does not.

If the page is still not indexed and none of these seven explains it, ask whoever holds the property to read you the rest of the reports inside it. Seven checks are not the whole list.

What does a monthly plan cover when this goes wrong?

No published inclusion names an indexing check, so a plan does not buy you one by default. What Essentials does publish is a “Quarterly health check on Lighthouse, accessibility, and broken links.” It costs £49 a month, with no setup fee and 30 days to get your money back. The rest of what each plan includes sits on our pricing page.

The plan does not make a page rank, and no plan can promise that. The maintenance work itself is sold on the maintenance plan we sell, and the wider job is on what we take on.

If you already pay somebody for maintenance, the fair question to put to them is which of the checks on this page they run, how often, and what they send you when one of them fails. A monthly bill that buys none of them is buying hosting under another name.

Who runs these checks on a site looked after from East Dulwich?

One person does. The same person who built the site is the one who runs the quarterly health check on it. That check runs out of East Dulwich, and you can read how far it reaches on the areas reachable from here.

You do not need us for any of this. The help pages are public and the checks are free. If a page of yours is missing and you cannot get into Search Console to find out why, send us the address of a page you cannot find on Google and we will tell you whether a noindex rule or the robots file is stopping it, which are the two checks anyone can run from outside.

Written and checked by Verithora, a one-founder web studio in East Dulwich, London SE22.

This is a plain-English summary of the rules as we read them on 5 September 2026, not legal advice.