Why Isn't Google Indexing My Website?

First, check your actual status

Before troubleshooting, confirm the page is really unindexed. Search site:yourdomain.com/your-page in Google — if nothing shows up, it's not indexed. For the authoritative answer, paste the URL into Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool — it tells you exactly why (crawled, not indexed / discovered, not crawled / blocked, etc.) instead of leaving you guessing.

1. A noindex tag is telling Google not to

View the page source and search for <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. This is the single most common self-inflicted cause — often left over from a staging environment, or set by a CMS/plugin default that was never switched off for production.

2. robots.txt is blocking the crawler

Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt for a Disallow rule matching your page's path. A rule meant for one section of the site (like /admin/) can accidentally match more than intended.

3. A canonical tag points somewhere else

If <link rel="canonical"> on the page points to a different URL, Google will index that URL instead — treating your page as a duplicate of it. This is easy to miss on CMS platforms that auto-generate canonicals.

4. No internal links point to it

Pages Google can't discover through a link from somewhere else on your site (or an external site) are much slower to get crawled at all, even with a submitted sitemap. Link to new pages from your homepage, a category page, or a recent-posts list.

5. The content looks thin or duplicated

Google is selective about what it spends crawl budget indexing. Pages with very little unique text, or that closely mirror another page on your own site, are common candidates for "Crawled - currently not indexed" in Search Console — Google saw it and chose not to index it.

6. The site or page is simply new

A brand-new domain, or a page with no submitted sitemap and no existing crawl history, can sit in Google's discovery queue for days to weeks before a crawler ever visits. This is the one cause that's not a mistake — just a timing problem, and the one you can actually push on (see below).

Speeding up discovery once the page itself is fixed

Once none of the causes above apply, the fastest legitimate levers are: submit an updated sitemap in Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool's "Request Indexing" button for individual pages, and for the search engines that support it — Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver — ping IndexNow the instant the page goes live instead of waiting for their next scheduled crawl. Google has no equivalent bulk API; Search Console is the only lever there.

A quick diagnostic order

1. Run a free indexability check to rule out status codes, noindex, robots.txt and canonical problems in one go.
2. Open URL Inspection in Search Console and read the exact status and reason.
3. If it says "Discovered - currently not indexed", improve discovery: internal links and a clean sitemap.
4. If it says "Crawled - currently not indexed", improve the content: more unique value, less duplication.
5. Request indexing once after fixing, then give it time.

Site-wide problems vs. single pages

If one page is missing, the cause is usually on that page. If most of a site is missing, look for site-wide causes first: a noindex left over from staging, a robots.txt that blocks everything, a CDN or firewall that blocks Googlebot, or a site-wide canonical pointing at the homepage. Search Console's Pages report shows which pattern you're dealing with.