Why Is My Website Not Showing Up on Google?

Adding new pages to your online store is like placing new books in a library. Until they’re cataloged, visitors can’t find them. Google works the same way. It needs to index your store’s pages before they appear in search results. 

If your store isn’t showing up in search engines yet, don’t panic. Learn more about why your website may not be showing up on Google, what can slow the indexing process down, and six tips to help your store’s pages get ranked in search results faster.

Why is my website not showing up on Google? 

Before you can rank for user searches, Google first has to crawl your site using automated bots called web crawlers and index your site’s pages. Because of this delay, most brand new websites and pages are invisible for a couple of days. If your store is brand new, Google may simply need time to index it.

If you’ve been selling for a while and your pages suddenly disappear, it could be a setting on your site. This could be something that’s discouraging search engines from indexing or displaying them, like a “noindex” tag or a blocked crawler.

Even after SEO work, a website might not appear in Google search results due to technical issues such as:

• Crawling blocked by robots.txt

• Noindex meta tags

• Missing sitemaps

• Linking issues (e.g., broken links, poor internal linking)

• Manual Google penalties for violations such as keyword stuffing or duplicate content

These issues make it difficult for search engine crawlers to understand the content of the page. As a result, they might not be able to rank the page for relevant queries.

How to improve your website’s visibility in Google search

1. Check for indexing issues
2. Submit your sitemap to Google
3. Create unique, valuable content
4. Make your website faster
5. Create internal links
6. Build backlinks

First, determine if there’s a technical reason preventing a website page from being displayed. Then, focus your efforts on improving website visibility and rankings. Here are six ways to get your store showing up in Google faster:

1. Check for indexing issues

First, confirm Google has indeed indexed your website using Google Search Console’s (GSC) URL Inspection tool. Another common way to check if your website has been indexed if you don’t have access to GSC is to type “site:” followed directly by your site’s URL or domain name into Google’s search bar.

For example, “site:allbirds.com.” If your website is already in Google’s index, the search results will return a list of all the pages from your domain. If this search delivers no results, it means Google hasn’t indexed your site yet.

If your website once showed in the search results but no longer appears, it could be that Google penalized your website by deindexing it. This is unlikely, but double-check Google Search Console for a notice of a manual penalty, which will also include the reason for the penalty, so you can fix the problem. 

Another possible reason your website is invisible could be that it’s accidentally blocked in your robots.txt file, a small file telling search engines which pages to crawl or skip. The page may also be set to noindex, which is a directive telling search engines to exclude it from search results. To rule this out, use Google’s URL inspection tool. 

2. Submit your sitemap to Google

Submitting your sitemap can help Google discover your site sooner, but it doesn’t guarantee immediate results.

To do this, create a Google Search Console account (previously called Google Webmaster Tools) and verify your website’s ownership. There are various verification models that you can use, such as:

• Uploading an HTML file and publishing it on your site

• Editing your homepage’s HTML source code

• Using your Google Analytics tracking code, a small snippet of JavaScript added to your website’s HTML

Then, create a sitemap. You can let your content management system (CMS) or website building platform create it for you. For instance, Shopify stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file. Here, you’ll have all the links to your:

• Products

• Primary product image

• Pages

• Collections

• Blog posts

In this document, you can specify which canonical URL (the preferred version of a page) you want the search engines to index. This way, you can avoid Google crawling similar pages. Once you have your sitemap, you can use the Sitemaps report in Search Console to submit it. 

3. Create unique, valuable content 

The quality of your content also plays a key role in where your website appears in the search results. Google searches its index for content that matches a search query and displays the webpage it thinks has the highest quality content on the topics related to the search.

While keywords play a role in making your content discoverable, there are other elements to consider as well. Arthur Camberlein, senior SEO specialist at Shopify, advises new businesses to focus on building a strong foundation of content first.

“Focus on your niche and slowly grow the website, the content, the product—if needed—and rely on good structure,” says Arthur.

This includes well-optimized product and collection pages, as well as five to 10 educational, evergreen blog posts related to your topic focus. Once your foundation is in place, you can add seasonal or trend-driven blog content to expand your visibility and capture timely search interest.

4. Make your website faster

Site load speed is considered a cornerstone of technical SEO, and if your site is too slow, Google takes notice. Websites appearing on the first page load in only 1.65 seconds, on average. A slow website creates a bad experience for search engines and internet users, resulting in fewer pages indexed and lower search rankings.

Check PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals for suggestions on how to improve your loading speed. Each tool shares performance scores, helping you prioritize which pages need intervention first.

5. Create internal links 

An internal link is a hyperlink on your website linking to another page within your site. This helps search engines understand how your content is structured and how different pages relate to each other, which signals topical relevance.

Arthur emphasizes that internal links can speed up visibility because when a new page is linked from an existing, high-authority page, Google is more likely to find and index it quickly. 

Link building strategies also distribute authority across your site by passing link equity from strong pages to newer ones. And, when related pages are linked to each other, they clarify their contextual relationship. For example, if you link a product page to a use-case page, you increase the likelihood of both pages ranking. It also improves the user experience by helping shoppers explore your products more deeply.

6. Build backlinks

While internal links give context to the relationship between pages, Arthur says backlinks (also called inbound links) are seen as recommendations from other sites. 

“When Google created its algorithm,” he says, “they thought of backlinks as peer reviews.”

For instance, if your store partners with a local blogger to review your new product line, the backlink from their blog can signal to Google that your store is trustworthy and relevant.

That said, not all backlinks are good for business and visibility. Spam links are typically low-quality and irrelevant links placed to manipulate search engine rankings. For example, if a pet food site pays a sports apparel website to link back to them, it may be considered a spam link since there’s no relationship between the content of the two sites.

This is a black hat SEO method that can lead to Google demoting your webpage or, worse, removing it. While black hat SEO is fast and easy, relying on white hat SEO methods focusing on the overall content quality will always be better for your site.

If you rely on affiliate marketing, you can avoid being found guilty of link spam by using the proper tags. Whenever you send a customer or influencer a product in exchange for a link, you need to qualify the link with a rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored.”