Why Isn’t My Website Showing Up On Google?
There’s nothing worse than Google ignoring your website.
Plenty of entrepreneurs, marketers, and advertisers spend hours and hours researching their customers, building great products and services, and designing amazing websites – only to discover Google isn’t listing them anywhere near the top page (or even at all)!
Unfortunately, a lot of this has to do with the “Field of Dreams” myth of website creation.
A lot of otherwise really savvy entrepreneurs and marketers think that they only have to build something and Google will handle the rest. “If you build it, they will come”.
Well, the world of online business doesn’t work like that anymore.
We live in ultra competitive times. New websites are popping up left and right (thousands of them every minute). You’re up against competition from all over the world – including some pretty aggressive and smart entrepreneurs and marketers that are willing to do anything to win.
Thankfully though, if your website isn’t showing up on Google it’s not the end of the world.
There are ways you can “force” Google to list your site – as well as tips and tricks you can use to bump your site higher in search engine rankings ASAP.
We break these things down below.
Reasons you might not be visible
Your Site Isn’t Indexed Yet
The number one reason that your site isn’t showing up on Google yet is almost always because Google hasn’t gotten around to indexing it.
As we mentioned a little bit earlier, there are literally thousands of websites being created every minute. Combine that with the billions of webpages that already exist – all of which have to be scraped by Google spiders – and it’s going to take a little bit of time to get to your new site.
Of course, you can definitely jumpstart the process a little bit.
First you want to make sure that you have a free Google Webmaster Tools account. After that, you want to register your website and then point Google to the site map of your site, too.
This essentially requests that their search spiders visit your pages again to reindex them. It might take a couple of days (it even might take a week or two) but this manual request guarantees that your site would will get indexed faster than it would have otherwise.
Your Site is Brand New
Again, this has to do partially with your site being too new to have been indexed yet but it also has to do with the fact that brand-new websites don’t have a lot of “SEO juice” going on, too.
Without back links, without other websites mentioning your site or pages, and without any real online footprint Google has no reason to include you in their search engine listings or to promote you near the top of the search results.
The search engine algorithm is going to have to get to know your site a little bit and that’s a process that can take three or four weeks. In the meantime, you’ll want to make sure that it is indexed, that you’re creating back links elsewhere, and that you have your on page search engine optimization really dialed in.
You Are in a Very Competitive SEO Space
If there’s a lot of competition for the keywords you are trying to rank for – especially if you’re shooting for global keywords as opposed to hyper targeted, longtail, local keywords – the chances are your site isn’t going to pop right to the top of the ranks anytime soon.
In the old days of Google (15 years ago or so) anybody could basically throw a webpage up, add a couple of links to it from another site that they owned, and absolutely dominate search engine optimization.
Today nothing could be further from the truth.
Huge websites backed by even bigger companies with almost bottomless budgets aren’t afraid to pump mounds of money into search engine optimization these days. Especially for highly lucrative keywords that are getting millions of searches every day.
This is why keyword research is such a big piece of the puzzle.
You want to be sure that your first going lucrative keywords. But you also need to make sure that you stand a good chance of ranking highly for the keywords you are going after, too.
There’s not a lot of value in being on page 3 of a super lucrative keyword when you don’t have the budget, time, or the energy to get any higher than that.
Your Website was removed from Google
This is a reason your site isn’t showing up that rarely gets talked about.
Believe it or not, though, Google is pretty aggressive when it comes to “pruning” sites from their search engine results.
They may ban you temporarily (or permanently) for any different number of reasons, with or without warning, and sometimes do so out of the clear blue sky.
Changes to the algorithm can reshuffle search engine results completely (just look up the devastation caused by the Panda and Penguin updates to the Google search engine results). You might run afoul of Google’s “code of conduct”, may promote content they don’t want to promote themselves, or they may simply accidentally kick you out of the Google sandbox when they meant to punish someone else.
This is something that you have to investigate yourself. You’ll usually receive a notification in your Google Webmaster Tools about the reason that you were shuffled off of the Google stage (though it might take a couple days after you’ve been kicked out).
Usually these notifications will tell you that you’ve been de-indexed (essentially banned from Google), penalized (not down a page or two in the listings for a variety of reasons), or “sandboxed” – basically shadow banned where you just aren’t getting the kind of traffic you used to at the same search engine position.
In the event of being removed from Google you’ll have to reach out to them directly to see how you can get back into compliance. You may or may not get the green light from this technology giant, though.
If you do, make sure that you bring your site back into compliance ASAP.
If you don’t, it’s time to get to work building a new website that is fully compliant just as soon as you’re able to.
Best of luck going forward!