My site isn't on Google — why it's not indexed
If your page isn't appearing on Google, the cause is usually one of four places: the page carries noindex, robots.txt blocks crawling, the canonical points elsewhere, or the sitemap isn't reachable at all. All four are technical checks you can verify yourself in five minutes — no agency report needed.
First tell them apart: can't be crawled, or won't be indexed?
Search Console states describe two different problems:
- Can't be crawled: Googlebot can't reach the page at all — robots.txt block, server error, or a WAF block. The page sits as "Discovered — currently not indexed".
- Crawled but not indexed: Googlebot saw the page but chose not to index it — a noindex tag, a canonical pointing to another page, or Google found the content thin/duplicative.
The first is a technical access problem, the second is a decision problem. Their fixes differ — so you need to know which one you have first.
Leftover noindex — the sneakiest cause
A theme change, a staging-to-production push or an SEO plugin update can leave <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on the page. The page looks healthy and gets crawled, but never enters the index — Google simply follows your explicit "I don't want this" instruction.
Verify yourself: open the source (Ctrl+U) and search for noindex. Also run curl -sI https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -i x-robots to check for an X-Robots-Tag header — noindex coming from there is invisible in the source.
robots.txt and sitemap check
Open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt: look for a blanket Disallow: / or blocks on important directories. The same file should contain a Sitemap: line pointing at an address that actually opens — if https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml returns 404, Google's discovery channel is broken.
Also verify your product/page URLs are actually listed inside the sitemap — a file that exists but is empty or points at an old domain does nothing.
If the canonical points the wrong way
Every page's <link rel="canonical"> tag says "I'm the real version". If a theme bug makes all pages canonical to the homepage, Google treats subpages as duplicates and drops them. Check in the source that the canonical points to the page's own URL.
If the technical side is clean: it's a content problem
If all four checks come back clean, the problem is most likely not technical but editorial: the page is too thin, nearly identical to others, or the site's authority on the topic is insufficient. That case needs original, comprehensive content for that page — and no tool can fix it automatically.
Frequently asked questions
Search Console says 'crawled, not indexed' — will it fix itself?
If there's a technical blocker, removing it fixes it; if there's no blocker, Google finds the content insufficient. The noindex/canonical/robots trio must be eliminated first; you can repeat the checks in this guide yourself.
How long does a new site take to get indexed?
It can take weeks; submitting a sitemap and earning a few external links speeds it up. 'Sandbox' isn't an official concept, but new sites take time to build authority — that's a delay, not a block.
The previous owner's URLs show up — what do I do?
If you took over the domain, old URLs returning 404 is normal and they drop over time. What matters is your own pages indexing correctly — track your URLs in Search Console.
These guides explain technical checks. Passing them does not guarantee search ranking or inclusion in AI answers.