"My website isn't on Google" describes two completely different problems, and the fix depends entirely on which one you have. Ten seconds tells you.
First, run this one check
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com.
- Zero results: you are not indexed. This is technical and usually fixable in an afternoon. Read on.
- Your pages appear: you are indexed — you're just not ranking well. That's a content and authority problem, not a technical one.
Most people conflate these and spend weeks writing content when a single meta tag was hiding the site.
1. A noindex tag is hiding you
The single most common cause of a site disappearing. A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag tells Google to exclude the page entirely — and it's often left behind after a site launch.
In WordPress, check Settings → Reading for "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Developers tick this during a build and forget to untick it at launch. It has erased more launches than any algorithm update.
2. robots.txt is blocking crawlers
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see this, you're blocking everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /That's a staging-site configuration that got deployed to production. Remove the Disallow: / line. Note that robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing — so it can also cause the odd "no information available" result.
3. The site is simply too new
Google has to discover you before it can index you. A brand-new domain with no inbound links can sit unnoticed for weeks. Fix it actively rather than waiting:
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and submit your XML sitemap.
- Use the URL Inspection tool and click "Request Indexing" on your key pages.
- Earn a couple of genuine links — a directory listing, a supplier page, a relevant forum profile. Crawlers follow links; with none, there's no path to you.
4. Canonical tags are pointing elsewhere
A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the real one. If every page canonicalises to your homepage — a surprisingly common CMS misconfiguration — Google drops the rest as duplicates. Check that each page's canonical points at itself.
5. No sitemap, no internal links
Orphan pages — reachable by no internal link and listed in no sitemap — are effectively invisible. If a human can't navigate to a page from your homepage in a few clicks, a crawler probably can't either.
6. The content is too thin to index
Google doesn't index every page it finds. Pages with almost no unique content routinely get crawled and then dropped as "Crawled – currently not indexed" in Search Console. If a page is 80 words of boilerplate, that's your answer.
7. A manual action or hosting block
Rare, but check: Search Console will show any manual penalty under Security & Manual Actions. Separately, over-aggressive firewall or bot-protection rules can block Googlebot itself — test how your server responds to Googlebot's user agent, not just your browser.
Work through it in order
These are listed roughly by how often they're the culprit. Check indexability first — it's binary and catastrophic — before touching anything subtle. An audit surfaces the noindex, robots, and canonical problems in one pass, which is the fastest way to rule out the fatal three. Run the free SEO checker on your homepage if you want those three in one shot.