If your website does not appear on Google, there are two possible situations and they need completely different responses. Either Google has not indexed your pages at all, or it has indexed them and is choosing to rank other pages higher.
Find out which in thirty seconds: search site:yourdomain.com on Google. If results appear, you are indexed and the problem is ranking. If nothing appears, you have an indexing problem, which is more urgent and usually easier to fix.
What follows is the order a technical SEO would actually work through, from fastest to check to slowest to fix. Work down it and stop when you find your cause.
Check these first — five minutes
1. Is your site blocked by a noindex tag?
The single most common cause, and the most embarrassing. WordPress has a setting under Settings → Reading called “Discourage search engines from visiting this site”. It gets switched on during development and forgotten at launch.
To check: view your page source and search for noindex. If you find <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, that is your answer. Remove it and request indexing in Search Console.
2. Is robots.txt blocking crawlers?
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks your entire site. Development sites are often deployed with this in place.
Note the distinction: robots.txt stops crawling, a noindex tag stops indexing. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results with no description, because Google knows it exists but was never allowed to read it.
3. Is the site new?
A brand new domain typically takes days to weeks to be indexed and considerably longer to rank for anything competitive. If your site launched last week, nothing is broken. Submit your sitemap and be patient.
4. Have you set up Google Search Console?
If not, do it now — it is free and it answers most of the remaining questions directly. Verify the property, submit your XML sitemap, and open the Pages report. Google will tell you which pages are indexed and, for those that are not, why.
Content problems
5. Your pages are too thin
Google indexes selectively. Pages with very little unique content — a heading, two sentences and a contact form — may be crawled and then not indexed, appearing in Search Console as “Discovered — currently not indexed” or “Crawled — currently not indexed”.
This particularly affects service pages built from a template where only the title changes. If ten pages share the same layout and differ by a sentence, expect Google to treat them as one page’s worth of value.
6. You have duplicate content
If the same content exists at two URLs, Google picks one and suppresses the other. Common causes: a page published under two post types, http and https versions both resolving, www and non-www both resolving, or printer-friendly duplicates.
Fix by choosing one canonical URL, 301-redirecting the others, and setting rel="canonical" correctly.
7. Your pages compete with each other
Keyword cannibalisation: two pages targeting the same term, splitting signals so neither ranks. If you have “Web Design Services” and “Website Design Services” as separate pages, they are competing for the same query.
Consolidate into one stronger page and redirect the other. This is one of the most common findings in a technical audit and one of the easiest wins.
Technical problems
8. Your site is too slow
Speed is measured through Core Web Vitals, and the reports confuse people because lab scores and real-visitor data routinely disagree — this explains which one Google actually uses.
Speed affects both ranking and crawling. If pages take many seconds to respond, Googlebot fetches fewer of them per visit, so new content takes longer to appear.
Test with PageSpeed Insights, and pay particular attention to server response time. If time to first byte is measured in seconds rather than milliseconds, the problem is server-side — hosting, an unoptimised database, a heavy plugin, or something worse.
We audited a site whose every page took over ten seconds to respond. Hosting was fine and the database answered in a millisecond. The cause was malicious code injected into the theme that opened a connection to an external server on every page load and waited out a ten-second timeout. Removing it took response times to under half a second. Which leads to the next one.
9. Your site has been hacked
If you suspect this, work through the recovery sequence in order — cleaning files without closing the entry point simply invites reinfection.
Compromised sites frequently carry code that shows different content to Googlebot than to human visitors — injected spam links, or redirects that fire only for search traffic. Because it hides from logged-in administrators, everything looks fine when you check.
Signs worth taking seriously: unexplained slowness, pages in Search Console you never created, a security warning in Search Console, or search results showing content you did not write.
To check what Google sees rather than what you see, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and view the fetched HTML. If it contains links you did not put there, you have your answer. Recovery means removing the malicious code, closing the entry route, rotating credentials, restoring clean core files and then requesting review — in that order.
Indexed, but not ranking
10. You are targeting terms you cannot win yet
If you are a new agency trying to rank for “web development company”, you are competing with directories and established firms with years of accumulated authority. You will not win that this year.
Target specific, longer queries where intent is clearer and competition thinner. “Web development company in Kathmandu” is winnable in a way that “web development company” is not, and it brings better-qualified visitors anyway.
11. Your page does not match the intent behind the query
Search the term you want to rank for and look at what actually ranks. If the first page is all comparison articles and yours is a sales page, Google has decided what kind of page answers that query — and it is not the kind you published.
Match the format that ranks. If cost queries return detailed breakdowns with tables, publish a detailed breakdown with a table.
A quick diagnostic order
| Symptom | Most likely cause | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| No pages indexed at all | noindex tag or robots.txt | Page source; /robots.txt |
| Some pages indexed, others not | Thin or duplicate content | Search Console → Pages |
| Indexed but zero impressions | Targeting terms nobody searches | Search Console → Performance |
| Impressions but no clicks | Weak titles and descriptions | Search Console → Performance |
| Rankings dropped suddenly | Hack, migration error, or algorithm update | Search Console → Security; recent changes |
| Very slow to index new pages | Slow server or weak crawl demand | PageSpeed Insights; server logs |
Frequently asked questions
How long does Google take to index a new website?
Typically a few days to a few weeks. Submitting an XML sitemap in Search Console and earning a link from an already-indexed site both help. Ranking for competitive terms takes months regardless of indexing speed.
Why is my homepage indexed but not my other pages?
Usually because the other pages are weakly linked internally, or Google judged them thin. Make sure every page is linked from somewhere in your navigation or content, is in your sitemap, and has enough unique content to justify its own URL.
Does submitting to Google actually help?
Submitting a sitemap and using URL Inspection’s “Request Indexing” does help Google discover pages sooner. Neither guarantees indexing — Google still decides whether a page is worth keeping.
My site was ranking and suddenly disappeared. What happened?
Check Search Console for manual actions and security issues first. Then look at what changed on your side — a migration, a redesign, a plugin update, a robots.txt edit. Sudden total disappearance is usually self-inflicted or a hack; gradual decline is more often competitive or algorithmic.
Do I need to pay for SEO to appear on Google?
No. Appearing in results is free; Google indexes content it can crawl. What you may need help with is fixing what blocks indexing, and competing for terms where others are actively working. See how much SEO costs in Nepal.
How do I know if my site is hacked?
Check Search Console for security issues, compare what the URL Inspection tool fetches against what you see in your browser, look for unexplained slowness, and search site:yourdomain.com for pages you did not create. Malware that targets search engines specifically will not be visible to you while logged in.
Still stuck?
Most sites that are not appearing on Google have one specific fixable cause, and it is usually in the first four items on this list.
If you have worked through it and still cannot tell, our SEO packages include a free technical audit that checks all of the above and reports what it finds. You can also read what a technical SEO audit actually finds to see the kind of issues that surface, or look at our SEO services for ongoing work.
