Why doesn't my website show up on Google? Five checks, in the order that finds it
Picture a plumber in Shropshire with a brand-new site, sure it has been "blocked". He paid for it, his brother-in-law says it looks great, and when he types "plumber Ludlow" into Google it is nowhere. Page one, two, three, nothing. The first thing to ask him is to do one thing before anything else: type his exact web address into the search box.
Two things can happen. His site comes straight back as the top result, perfectly healthy, and he has been looking for the wrong thing. Or it does not. Across the UK the complaint arrives in two disguises, and they have different causes and different fixes. One is a site Google has never stored. The other is a site it stores and ranks below ten competitors. This post is about the first, because it is the one you can settle in ten minutes.
Search your exact web address first. If the site comes back, Google has it and you have a ranking problem. If nothing comes back, you have an indexing problem, and in the UK it is nearly always one of five things: a noindex tag, a block in robots.txt, a site too new to have been crawled, no links or sitemap pointing at it, or the wrong address version being offered.
Two different problems wear the same complaint
Searching your full web address is the quickest test of whether a page is on Google at all, and Google's own help page for its URL Inspection tool describes it as the definitive one.
Type the address exactly, with the domain and nothing else. Three outcomes are possible. Your site comes first: it is stored and the trouble is ranking, which is a longer job with its own answers. Your site does not appear but a directory or a Facebook page does: Google knows the business exists and has not stored the site. Nothing relevant appears: same conclusion, less noise.
The second and third outcomes are what the rest of this page is for. If it is the first, the traffic-but-no-calls version of the complaint is a different diagnosis, and for a site that ranks well below where it should, a joinery site that gets no enquiries is a worked example of what to look at instead.
The five checks, in the order that finds it
Run them top to bottom, because the first two are free, take a minute each and are where a finished site most often turns out to be hiding.
| Check | What to look for | Where you look | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Noindex | A tag telling Google to keep the page out | View page source, search for noindex | Remove it, or untick the builder's privacy setting |
| 2. Blocked crawling | A rule in robots.txt shutting Googlebot out | yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt | Delete the Disallow line covering the whole site |
| 3. Too new | Weeks since launch, nothing linking in | Search Console, URL Inspection | Submit once, then wait up to a few weeks |
| 4. No route in | No sitemap, no links, profile pointing elsewhere | Search Console, Sitemaps | Submit a sitemap and link from your Business Profile |
| 5. Wrong version | http, https, www and bare domain disagreeing | Type each version into a browser | One version, with the others redirecting to it |
Noindex and blocked crawling are the two that hide a finished site
Google documents noindex as a meta tag or an HTTP header, and says it can only act on the tag if it is allowed to fetch the page, so a robots.txt block can stop it ever seeing the instruction.
Both of these usually arrive by accident. Site builders and WordPress both offer a setting that asks search engines to leave the site alone, and it is switched on while the site is being built because nobody wants half-finished pages showing up. Then the site launches and nobody turns it off. Open the page, view its source and search for the word noindex. If it is there, that is your answer.
The robots.txt check is simpler still. Add /robots.txt to your address. A line reading Disallow followed by a single slash tells crawlers to stay out of everything. Remove it, and remove the noindex, then ask for a recrawl, because Google will not look again on its own timetable.
Too new, and no way in, is the ordinary case
Google's guidance on recrawls says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, that asking repeatedly for the same address does not speed it up, and that a request does not guarantee a place in the results.
If checks one and two come back clean, the likeliest answer is the dullest: Google has not got round to you. A new site with no links pointing at it is the last in the queue. The two free moves are to paste the home page into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and request indexing, and to submit a sitemap, which Google recommends for a brand-new site. Once each is done, doing it again helps nothing.
What does help is a route in. The website link on your Google Business Profile counts, so do make sure it is filled in, and any other UK site that links to yours, a trade body or a supplier directory, gives Googlebot another door. This is also where the SEO work I do starts, because a site with no inbound path cannot be found however good it is, and AI search tools lean on the same discovery.
What 156 business profiles tell Google about their address
Of 156 UK trade businesses in three Shropshire market towns whose profile links to their own website, 78 hand Google an address beginning http:// and 107 use the www spelling against 49 that do not.
I keep cold-call lead sheets of real trade businesses. In September 2026 I swept eighteen trade searches in Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton, 233 distinct businesses in all. Every earlier cut of that sweep measured the businesses. This one reads the address each profile gives Google as its website, because that link is the first thing Google is told.
Of the businesses that link to their own site rather than to a Facebook page or a directory, the split is exactly half and half on http://. Nineteen point at a deep page rather than the home page, six carry a tracking string after a question mark, and two sit on a free builder subdomain rather than their own domain. Seven in ten use the www spelling and three in ten use the bare one.
Read this carefully, because it is a measure of the address typed into a profile, not of how the site is built. Plenty of those http:// addresses will redirect to https, and I could not test that from where I wrote this. What it does show is how rarely the address is chosen on purpose. Check five in the table is the case where http, https, www and bare each load the page separately, which splits what Google learns about you across four addresses. Type all four into a browser. If more than one stays as it is, you have found it.
Waiting, fixing or asking for help
If your site is under a month old and checks one, two and five are clean, wait. If it is older and still missing, one of the five is wrong.
A site I build gets launch checks before it goes to a customer, and the hostname redirects, the sitemap and the metadata are part of them. A free mockup comes first and it is £50 every four weeks with no build fee, so the question of whether Google can find it is mine to answer, not yours. And if what you actually want is the top of the map for your trade, that is a separate ranking contest, which the Google Maps top 3 post works through with real numbers.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex, for the tag and the HTTP header and for the page needing to be fetchable for the instruction to be read.
- Google Search Central, Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet and X-Robots-Tag specifications, for how the page-level settings are read and followed.
- Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs, for crawling taking days to weeks, a sitemap for a new site, repeat requests not speeding things up and no guarantee of inclusion.
- Search Console Help, URL Inspection tool, for the tool not covering every requirement and a search for the URL being the definitive test.
- Sitework's Google Maps listing sweep of Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton, September 2026: 333 listing rows, 234 distinct businesses by name and phone, 156 with a web link that is not a Facebook page, review site or directory profile. Used here for the scheme, www and deep link counts of the profile address. It records the address typed into the profile, not how the site responds. No business is named.