The three reasons a site stays invisible
When someone says « my site isn't on Google », the cause is almost always one of these three:
- A stray « noindex » setting — a single ticked box (« Discourage search engines from indexing this site » in WordPress, or its equivalent in Wix and Shopify) telling Google NEVER to show your site. Extremely common after a redesign: the setting from the staging version stayed behind. In the page source it looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">. The check above looks for it, and for the X-Robots-Tag header that does the same thing without appearing in the page at all. - The robots.txt file — your site's front door for Google. One line (
Disallow: /) is enough to keep it out entirely. See what yours should look like. - A site too new, or never announced — Google simply does not know it exists yet. Nothing is broken here: it needs help finding you (a sitemap, a Google Business listing, a first few links).
What this tool does not tell you
It checks the technical blocks, which are the fixable part. It cannot tell you whether Google has decided your pages are worth showing — that depends on content, on how old the domain is, and on who else is competing for the same searches. A site that passes all five checks and still gets no traffic does not have an indexing problem.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check if Google has indexed my site?
Paste your address above: the check looks for the settings that keep a site out of the results — a meta robots noindex tag, an X-Robots-Tag header, a robots.txt that blocks everything, a missing sitemap or title. It also hands you the site: search link so you can see exactly what Google currently holds.
What does the site: search actually tell me?
Typing site:yoursite.com in Google lists the pages it has indexed for that domain. No results means nothing is indexed. A handful of results when you have a hundred pages means most of the site is unknown to Google — usually a crawling problem rather than a penalty.
What does content="noindex" mean?
It is an instruction written into the page: a meta robots tag with content="noindex" asks Google not to show it in search results. Useful while a site is being built, catastrophic when nobody removes it at launch — which happens constantly after a redesign.
How long does it take to appear in Google?
For a brand new site: days to a few weeks for the home page, several months to rank well on competitive searches. If your site is more than two months old and cannot be found even by searching its exact address, a technical block is the likely cause.
What's the difference between being indexed and ranking?
Being indexed means Google knows your site exists. Ranking means it shows you in the first results. This tool checks indexing — the technical part, which is fixable in minutes. Ranking is a different problem: content, age and competition.
My site is indexed but gets no traffic. What now?
Then nothing technical is wrong, and no tool will fix it. You are either ranking on searches nobody makes, or you are on page four of searches people do make. Both are content and authority problems, not indexing problems.
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