Knowledge base
Why a page is not in Google yet
Indexing is not automatic and not instant. The five things to check, in the order worth checking them.
Being live and being indexed are different things. Google chooses what to index, and it does not choose everything.
1. Is it blocked?
Check robots.txt and the page's own noindex tag. A noindex is invisible to a visitor and absolute to a crawler. This is the single commonest cause and takes ten seconds to rule out.
2. Is it in your sitemap?
A sitemap does not force indexing, but a page absent from it is one Google may never look for. Check that the URL appears, and that the sitemap is submitted in Search Console.
3. Does the page canonical to itself?
If the page's rel=canonical names a different URL, you have asked Google to index that other one instead. This is easy to do by accident with parameters, print views and translated URLs.
4. Is there enough on it?
A page with a heading and two sentences competes with pages that answer the question. Google crawls it, decides it adds nothing, and does not index it. That is a content answer, not a technical one.
5. Has it simply not been long enough?
A new page on an established site is usually picked up within days. A new page on a new domain can take weeks. Requesting indexing in Search Console once is worth doing; requesting it repeatedly is not.
⭐ We check indexing for your sites on a schedule and show the result on the site's SEO panel, so you can see the answer rather than guess at it.
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