Why can't I find my website on Google?

There are two completely different problems, and each needs its own fix: either Google doesn’t know your site, or it knows it perfectly well — but shows it on page six. Work out which one it is before you do anything else. Otherwise you spend money on the wrong thing.

Here is the test that settles it. Search for this on Google, with your own domain:

site:yourwebsite.dk

If no results appear, Google doesn’t know the site. That is an indexing problem, and it is usually both faster and cheaper to solve. If results do appear, the site is known and the problem is the ranking. Then it is the last four points below that apply.

1. The site is too new

The most common answer, and the one nobody wants to hear. A new site first has to be found, crawled and assessed. It typically takes days to weeks before it is even indexed, and months before it ranks on anything competitive.

We have measured it on our own site: the first article we published got impressions in Search Console four days after it was crawled. The position was 58 — page six, in other words. That is a normal starting point, not a fault.

If the site is less than a month old, there is often nothing wrong. Move on to points 2 and 3, and otherwise be patient.

2. There is a noindex tag on the page

This is the mistake that costs the most businesses the most, and it is nearly always an oversight.

During development you put a noindex tag on, so the half-finished site doesn’t end up in Google. At launch it has to be removed. It isn’t always.

How to check: open your site, right-click, choose “View page source”, and search for the word noindex. If it is there, that is the answer to your entire question. A page with noindex can never appear in Google, however good the content is and however long you wait.

3. robots.txt is blocking it

Type yourwebsite.dk/robots.txt in the browser. If it says this, the whole site is closed:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

An important detail many people get wrong: Disallow and noindex do not solve the same problem. If you want a page out of Google, use noindex and let Google crawl it. If you block it in robots.txt, Google can’t see your noindex tag — and then the page can stay in the search results for a long time.

4. Google doesn’t know about your pages

Even a site with no blocks has to be found. If you have no sitemap and nobody links to you, it can take a very long time.

• Create a sitemap.xml with every page you want indexed
• Set up Google Search Console for your domain — it is free
• Submit the sitemap under Indexing → Sitemaps
• Use URL inspection to request indexing of your most important pages

When we expanded our own sitemap from 12 to 37 URLs, that was the change that moved the most — not because the old pages got better, but because there was suddenly something to find.

5. You are searching for something nobody else searches for

Now we are into ranking problems, and this is the mistake people rarely spot themselves.

Most people check their visibility by googling their own company name. That isn’t a test of anything. Your customers don’t know your company name — that is why they are searching.

They search for what you do, plus where you are: “hairdresser Nørresundby”, “carpenter Aalborg”, “dentist near me”. If those words can’t be found in your page title and your body text, Google has no way of knowing the page is about that.

More on this in a website for the local business.

6. Every page has the same title

The page title is the strongest single signal you control yourself, and it is also what people read in the search result before they click.

If all your subpages are called “Home | Company name”, you have effectively told Google the pages are identical. Each page needs its own title that describes that page, and that contains the words somebody would search for.

The same goes for the meta description. It doesn’t affect the ranking directly, but it decides how many people click — and that does get measured.

7. The content only appears after JavaScript has run

If the site is built entirely in the browser, there can be very little in the HTML Google receives first. Google can render JavaScript, but it happens later and not always completely.

Test it: right-click, “View page source” — not “Inspect element”, because the two do not show the same thing. If you can’t find your body text in the source, that is probably what Google is missing too.

Our own pages are built at publish time and served as plain HTML files. All the text is there from the first byte. It is one of the reasons we don’t build in heavy frameworks — see WordPress or custom-built.

8. The site is too slow or doesn’t work on mobile

Google assesses the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version. If it is slow, or you have to zoom to tap anything, it costs rankings — and it costs customers long before that.

Check your site on PageSpeed Insights, and read why your website is slow for the five causes behind almost every slow site.

The order to check in

Spend half an hour on this before you spend money on anything:

1. site:yourwebsite.dk — does Google know the site at all?
2. Search for noindex in the page source
3. Open /robots.txt
4. Set up Search Console and submit a sitemap
5. Search for what your customers would search for — not your company name
6. Check that each page has its own title
7. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile

Points 1 to 3 take ten minutes and catch most cases of “we aren’t on Google at all”.

What we do

We do a free check: you get told what is actually blocking it, what can be fixed without rebuilding, and what requires more. Honestly — including when the answer is “your site is fine, it is just three weeks old, wait”.

If a rebuild is needed, you get one fixed price for the work after a no-obligation conversation — and if we are also to keep the site visible afterwards, ongoing SEO costs DKK 975 a month. We are three developers with no project managers or salespeople, and that is the cost you would otherwise be paying on top of the work itself. See prices or redesign.

Frequently asked questions

How long before my new site is on Google? Typically days to weeks to be indexed. Ranking on competitive searches takes months. You can speed up indexing by submitting a sitemap and requesting indexing in Search Console.

Can I pay Google to be included? You can buy ads, but they don’t buy positions in the ordinary results. The two are separate, and nobody can sell you a guaranteed position. If somebody promises that, it is a warning sign.

My site used to be on Google, but it’s gone now. Check noindex and robots.txt first — it is nearly always a change made during an update. If the site has moved to new addresses without redirects, the old rankings have been lost, and that has to be fixed with 301 redirects.

Do I need a blog to show up? Not to be indexed. But if you only have pure sales pages, there is nothing that can rank on the questions people ask before they are ready to buy. That is where most of the traffic sits.

Does buying links help? No. It goes against Google’s guidelines and can cost you what you have. Mentions from trade bodies, local media and customers you have built for are what works.