Check these six, in this order: a noindex tag left on from staging, a robots.txt line blocking crawlers, no sitemap submitted, pages nothing links to, thin or duplicated content, and a canonical tag pointing at somebody else's address. The table below adds two more. Confirm each with URL Inspection in Google Search Console. Not sure indexing is your problem? Run the two-minute test first.
Check what Google sees, not what you published
Every item below has a version where the page looks fine to you and is invisible to a crawler, so stop looking at your own website. Paste the address into URL Inspection in Google Search Console. It reports whether the page is indexed and what blocked it.
A noindex left on from staging is the commonest cause and the hardest to see
While a site is being built it carries one line telling search engines not to store it. Correct during the build, meant to come off on launch day. Often it does not, because nothing about the finished site looks wrong. There is simply an instruction in the code telling Google to walk away.
On WordPress it is a checkbox: Settings, then Reading, then the line about discouraging search engines. Builders have their own version under search or SEO settings. Or open the page source and search for noindex.
robots.txt stops the crawl before the page is ever read
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the whole site. Staging setups ship with it; launches inherit it.
The two are not the same failure. robots.txt stops Google fetching the page; a noindex stops Google storing a page it did fetch. Block a page in robots.txt and Google never reads the noindex on it either, which is a common way to get stuck.
| What to check | How to confirm it | What fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| noindex left on from staging | URL Inspection says excluded by noindex | Switch off the search-engine setting, then request indexing |
| robots.txt blocking crawlers | yourdomain.com/robots.txt shows Disallow: / | Remove the blocking line |
| No sitemap submitted | Search Console, Sitemaps, is empty | Submit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml |
| Orphan pages | Nothing indexed links to the page | Add real links from pages Google already holds |
| Thin or duplicated content | "Discovered, currently not indexed" in Page indexing | Make each page say something the others do not |
| Canonical pointing elsewhere | URL Inspection names a canonical on another domain | Remove it, or point it at your own address |
| Staging password still on | Loads for you, blocked for a stranger | Remove the password from the live domain |
| Text trapped in images or PDFs | You cannot select the words | Put the words on the page as text |
Pages nothing links to, and pages that say nothing, get skipped
Crawlers arrive by following links. A page reachable only from a form, a PDF, or a script-drawn menu is unreachable however live it is. The fix is dull and it works: link to it from a page Google already holds.
Finding a page and keeping it are separate decisions, though. "Discovered, currently not indexed" means Google knows the address and has not stored it. Two patterns cause it: service pages that differ by one word, so six pages say one thing, and text lifted from a supplier or franchise pack, which already exists under another name. Words inside an image are not text either, so a menu uploaded as a photograph has nothing to index.
None of this is a guarantee, and saying so is not a dodge
You can clear every row above and still not be indexed on the day you hoped. There is no published schedule to hold anyone to, so treat an exact number of days from a vendor as a guess said with confidence. What the list buys is the removal of every reason you control, which is the whole job available to you.
The two that cost people most are the two that look like nothing: a noindex from staging, and a canonical copied with a template. Both leave a website that is perfect in every visible respect and absent from Google, and both survive because people check the site instead of what Google says about it.
— Prajwal
When this isn't right for you
This list is not your answer if:
- Your pages already come back from a site: search. You are indexed, and yours is a ranking problem, covered in the diagnosis guide.
- You want somebody to own your search performance. That is an SEO retainer, and we do not sell one.
- Your own team understands the system. These are one-line fixes for whoever built the site.
- You need new pages written to replace the thin ones. We build from what is already on your site. Outsourced copywriting alone runs $5,000 to $15,000, by AWAI's 2026 figures.
Where a rebuild actually helps
Only on the last row of that table. If your words are locked inside images, the page itself is the fix. We rebuild your existing site from your own content for $49, $99 or $249, paid once, and you see it finished and free before deciding. We do not sell SEO and we do not promise rankings.
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