You are in the right place if you want to figure out how to check if your website is showing up on Google.
Maybe you are a new business owner, have a new website in general, or work as an SEO. It’s the same across the board, and this will show you the easiest way to check if you’re indexed and answer your question, “is my site on Google?”
Step 1: Type site:insertname.com in Google.com’s search bar
This is what they call a search operator. When you add the “site:” portion with no spaces it will only search for pages that are showing up in Google Search from the website you type. In this example, I use a new website I just started called tooldigg.
Step 2: Analyze the search results
If your site is on Google and being indexed, it will show up here. If none of your pages are showing up or you get no results, then scroll further down for ideas on how to get your site to show up on Google.
It will look like this:
The results are all the pages that Google has identified and will potentially rank for specific searches by users.
Why Is My Site Missing From Google?
Google is a robot. The Google search engine needs to find your website, crawl (scan) your website, and index (list) your website in the results. It does take time to accomplish these tasks. Google provides a timeline between 1-21 days for this process to complete.
There are a number of reasons why pages would be missing from Google results. Some of these reasons include:
- Duplicate Content – Your content is too similar to another page result
- Google has not found your website yet
- Manual actions can remove your site entirely
- You recently changed your website structure
- You purchased a previously owned domain
- Outdated content
- Security Issues
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BOOK A CALLHow To Find Out Why Your Is Missing?
The easiest way to find out why your site is missing from the search engine result pages (SERPs) is by using Google Search Console. Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool that was developed by Google to monitor the indexing of your website on Google Search. There are various tools within the GSC you can use to diagnose and fix issues.
The tool is completely free and I recommend setting it up right now. It will honestly save you the most time.
URL Inspection Tool – This tool will allow you to type in the URL of a page and Google will tell you various information about it. They will check to see if the page has been crawled, indexed, the date it was last checked, whether indexing is allowed, and more.
When a page is not being indexed by Google it will look like this:
When a page is being found and indexed by Google it will look like this:
Check Removals Section – The removals section will tell you if your page or website has been penalized due to outdated content, temporary removals, and SafeSearch filtering.
Outdated content is just very old content that is no longer relevant. Temporary removals could be due to a variety of reasons, but likely because the algorithm is unsure about the content and will get reviewed manually. The SafeSearch filters out explicitly content from Google search results. This is something you can turn on or off for your own Google account, and other users have the same capabilities.
You have the option to challenge some of these actions if you feel they are incorrect. So you can do all this from the tool itself. You can diagnose the problem and attempt to fix it from within the Google Search Console.
Manual Actions – Google has guidelines in a place called Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines. When a human reviewer deems that your website or web page does not follow these guidelines, they can take manual action against that page to remove it from the Search Results. They would show up here under the security and manual actions tab:
How To Increase The Chance Google Finds Your Page
Google might advise a bit differently here, but I can point you to some free tools and plugins in order to do this automatically.
Create and submit a sitemap
A sitemap is a list of organized URL’s on your website built for the Google robot to read easier. This list can be broken down into several pages for posts, home page, pages, images, videos, and more.
If you are using WordPress, many plugins will do this automatically for you. My favorite plugin is Rank Math SEO and it automatically creates and submits your sitemap for you. Love this. You can also get this done with Yoast SEO as well as many other SEO plugins.
Sitemaps are usually created on a page with a URL that looks like this “tooldigg.com/sitemap.xml” or “https://tooldigg.com/sitemap_index.xml”. And this is what the sitemap page looks like.
I almost always link to this sitemap in the footer of the website. Which is the section that shows up across the entire site at the very bottom when you scroll down. Like so:
Because Google will crawl (scan) your page and automatically follow the links provided, adding the link here to your sitemap will make sure when Google does find your home page, they will also find every other post and page associated with your website.
Webflow, Wix, and Squarespace are other types of website builders that will automatically create a sitemap for you. The one thing you should do is a link to this sitemap from your navigation.
To recap how to increase your odds at being crawled and indexed, you should check Google for your site by using the search operator shown at the start of this blog post, “site:insertwebsite.com”. You should also make sure to link the Google Search Console tool to your website so you can diagnose and fix issues from within the tool. If you are using WordPress, download a plugin to help you automatically create a sitemap. If you are using another builder, they will do it for you, just make sure you link to the page from your navigation.
You can also check out our local SEO services in Calgary if you are looking for help with your digital marketing efforts.