Why isn’t my website showing on Google?

First: is Google hiding your site, or just not ranking it?

“Not showing on Google” is three different problems, and each one has a different fix. A minute of searching tells you which one you have.

1. Search Google for site: and your address, with no space after the colon: site:yourbusiness.co.za. Google lists the pages it has from your site. If nothing comes up, Google hasn’t indexed you yet, and the reasons are further down.
2. Then search for what you do and where, the way a customer would: “electrician Hartbeespoort”, “physio Pretoria East”. If your pages came up for site: but not for this, you’re on Google. You just aren’t ranking where people look.
3. Look at the map at the top of those results, with a short list of businesses under it. If everyone but you is on it, that’s your Google Business Profile, not your website, and our Google Maps guide covers it.

Search the way your customers do, from where they are. Google weighs the searcher’s location, so the same search in Pretoria and in Potchefstroom brings up different businesses, and a search from your own office isn’t what your customers see.

Add your site to Google Search Console

Search Console is Google’s own free tool for website owners, and it ends the guessing: it tells you which of your pages are on Google and, for the ones that aren’t, why.

Add your site at search.google.com/search-console and prove that you own it; your platform’s help pages or your web designer can walk you through that step. Then paste your homepage’s address into the bar at the top, the URL Inspection tool. “URL is not on Google” means the page can’t appear in results, and the details underneath say why. Fixed the cause? Click Request indexing. Google keeps a daily limit on requests, and asking twice for the same page doesn’t make it faster.

The Page indexing report lists every address Google knows about and why each one isn’t indexed. Don’t panic at the number: Google says not to expect every address on a site to be indexed, and many of the reasons are harmless. In October 2026 our own report listed 24 of our addresses as not indexed. Sixteen were old addresses that now redirect to new pages, seven were alternate versions of pages Google does index, and one needed a look. These are the reasons that matter, on pages you want people to find:

URL marked ‘noindex’

Your own site is asking Google to leave the page out. Usually a setting or a line of code, both covered below.

URL blocked by robots.txt

A file on your site tells Google not to read the page.

Crawled - currently not indexed

Google read the page and chose not to list it. Often it’s thin, or too like another page.

Discovered - currently not indexed

Google knows the address but hasn’t read the page yet. Common on a new site.

Not found (404), Server error (5xx)

The page was missing, or your server failed, when Google came to read it.

Why Google can’t see your website

When the site: search comes back empty, it’s almost always one of these five.

It’s new, and nothing links to it

Google finds pages mainly by following links from pages it already knows, so a new site that nothing links to can sit unnoticed, and Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Help it along: put your address everywhere you already are, on your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, your WhatsApp Business profile, your email signature and the directories you’re listed on. Then submit your sitemap in Search Console. Most website platforms make one for you, usually at yourbusiness.co.za/sitemap.xml.

A setting is telling Google to stay away

Every website platform has a switch that hides the whole site from search engines, so it can be built in private. It’s easy to leave on at launch. Check yours:

• WordPress: Settings, Reading, Search engine visibility. “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” must be unticked.
• Wix: SEO & GEO in your dashboard, Tools and settings, SEO Settings. “Let search engines index your site” must be on, and the site published.
• Squarespace: trial, expired and cancelled sites aren’t found at all, so you need a paid plan and a published site. Then check Settings, Crawlers, where “Block search engine crawlers” must be unticked, and each page’s SEO tab for “Hide this page from search results”.

A line of code is blocking it

Built in code, or no switch to find? Open your homepage on a computer, right-click it, choose View Page Source and search for noindex. A line like <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> asks Google to leave the page out, and Google drops a page from its results once it sees it. A plugin, a theme update or a developer’s test setting can add it without anyone noticing.

Then open yourbusiness.co.za/robots.txt. Disallow: / under User-agent: * tells every search engine not to read anything on the site. Google is clear that robots.txt isn’t a way to keep a page out of its results, either: a blocked address can still show up, with no description, and Google can’t see a noindex on a page it isn’t allowed to read.

A password, a “coming soon” page or a site that’s down

Google can’t list what it can’t open. A password on the homepage, a “coming soon” page left up after launch, and a server that keeps failing all look the same to Google: nothing worth listing. If your hosting or your .co.za domain wasn’t renewed in time, the site may have been offline long enough to drop out.

Google read it and didn’t think it was worth listing

Google names low-quality content as a common reason a page isn’t indexed. A page with three lines on it, a price list saved as a picture, or ten town pages with only the town’s name changed give Google very little to list. Google also indexes your site the way a phone sees it, so words that only show up on a computer don’t count.

On Google, but not when customers search

If site: lists your pages but a search for what you do doesn’t, Google has your site and ranks other businesses above it. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months. These are the ones that move you.

Say what you do and where, in your customers’ words

Google matches pages to the words people search. If you fit roofs in Centurion, your homepage should say “roofing in Centurion” in plain words, not “quality solutions for your home”. Give each main service its own page that explains it properly, and give every page its own title: Google builds the blue headline in its results mostly from your page’s title, and asks for a distinct, descriptive one on every page, without the same words repeated. Google ignores the keywords meta tag, so filling it in does nothing.

Get other websites to link to yours

Google uses links as a signal of what a page is about, as well as to find it. Start with the links that are yours to ask for: your Google Business Profile, your suppliers’ and partners’ websites, your trade association, the local directories your customers use, and the local news site when you do something worth a story. Never pay for links: Google’s spam policies name buying links for ranking as link spam.

Expect your town to set the pace

In a big city the first page is full of businesses that have collected links and reviews for years, so a new site climbs for months. In a smaller town fewer businesses compete for the same page, and a well-made site gets there sooner. Either way, the businesses on page one are the ones that kept going.

On Google, but not on the map

The map with its short list of businesses comes from Google Business Profiles, not from websites. A great website won’t put you on it by itself, and a profile can’t explain why you’re the better choice. You want both, linked to each other. Our guide to getting your business on Google Maps walks through the free profile, verification and how Google ranks the map.

When the problem is the website itself

A setting takes a minute to fix. Some sites can’t be fixed with one: a builder template with a few lines on each page, a site that’s mostly pictures of text, an old WordPress site that takes ten seconds to open on a phone, or a site your previous designer still controls.

That’s the site we rebuild. Every site we make is written with you, in the words your customers search for, built in code to be fast on a phone, set up properly for Google and AI search from the first day, and tied to your Google Business Profile. If your old site has pages Google already ranks, we keep them or redirect their addresses, so you don’t lose what you’ve built.

Our free website check tests ten things in a few seconds, among them the title and description Google shows for your page and whether it tells Google which town you serve.