Why your site is not on Google yet

The site went live a fortnight ago. You search for your own business name and there is nothing — or there is your Facebook page, a directory that has your old number, and a competitor. This is the most common question we are asked in the first month, and the answer is almost never “something is broken”. It is one of six things, and you can find out which in about ten minutes.

How a page gets into Google at all

Three steps, in order, and each can fail on its own. Google has to discover that the page exists, usually by following a link from a page it already knows about. It then has to crawl it — fetch it and read it. Then it decides whether to index it — to keep a copy and consider showing it in results. Only indexed pages can appear. A brand new site with no links pointing at it can sit undiscovered for weeks, and that is not a fault; it is the default.

So the first question is not “why am I not ranking” but “does Google know the page exists”. Type site:yourdomain.bt into Google. If it returns your pages, you are indexed and the problem is further down this list. If it returns nothing, start at the top.

1. It is simply too new

A site nobody links to is discovered when Google happens to encounter it, which may be never in the first month. You do not have to wait for that. Google Search Console is a free tool in which you prove you own the domain and then tell Google directly about your pages. Verifying takes an afternoon the first time; the short version is: add your site, submit your sitemap, and use “Request indexing” on your homepage. Pages submitted that way are typically crawled within days rather than weeks.

2. Nothing links to it

Discovery follows links, and links are also how Google decides a page is worth anything. A new site should have, at the least, a link from your Google Business Profile, from your Facebook page, and from any directory or association that lists you. Each of these is a place Google already visits regularly, so each is a path to your door. Ask suppliers, partners and the organisations you belong to whether they link to members. It is the single most effective thing you can do, and it costs nothing.

3. It is telling Google to stay away

Two switches can do this and both are invisible to a visitor. A file called robots.txt at the root of your domain can forbid crawling, and a noindex instruction in a page's code can forbid indexing. Both are legitimately used while a site is being built and both are forgotten when it launches. Search Console reports either one under the page's status. If you did not build the site yourself, ask whoever did whether either was set during development — this is a frequent cause and an instant fix.

4. It is there, but under a different address

khamsum.bt, www.khamsum.bt, http:// and https:// are four different addresses to a search engine, and a site that answers on all four without saying which is the real one splits itself four ways. Each page should declare one canonical address and the others should redirect to it. If you searched for one form and the site is indexed under another, it is there — you were looking in the wrong place. Pick one form, use it everywhere you print the address, and make the others redirect.

5. It is indexed and does not rank

If site:yourdomain.bt shows your pages but a search for your business name does not, the problem is not indexing. It is that Google does not yet associate that name with you strongly enough, usually because the site is new, has few links, and — most often — because the name barely appears on it. Read your own homepage and count how many times your business name is written in text a machine can read. A logo image does not count. If the answer is once, in the footer, you have found the problem.

Related: if your name is a common word — a place, a Dzongkha term many businesses use — you are competing with everything else that word means. Pair it consistently with your town and your trade wherever it appears: Khamsum Guesthouse, Paro, not Khamsum.

6. The page has almost nothing on it

Google indexes pages it judges worth indexing, and it is increasingly willing to leave thin ones out entirely — Search Console reports these as “Crawled — currently not indexed”. A homepage consisting of a slideshow, a logo and a phone number gives it very little to work with. The guide on what to actually put on a small business website is the remedy: real sentences about what you do, where, for whom, at what hours. That text is what gets you found, and it is also what a visitor wanted anyway.

The ten-minute diagnosis

1. site:yourdomain.bt — anything? If no, you are at 1–4. If yes, you are at 5–6.
2. Open Search Console. If you have not set it up, that is the first fix.
3. In Search Console, inspect your homepage URL. It tells you whether the page is indexed and, if not, why — a noindex, a robots block, a redirect, or simply “discovered, not yet crawled”.
4. Type your domain into a browser with and without www. Do both land on the same address, or do you have two sites?
5. Read your homepage as text. Is your business name, town and trade actually written on it?

What not to do

Do not pay anyone who promises a first-page position, a fixed number of “backlinks”, or results in a week. There is no lever that does that, and the things sold under that description — links from irrelevant sites, pages stuffed with repeated words — are the things Google penalises. The unglamorous list above is what works, and none of it costs money. What it costs is a few weeks of patience after you have done it, which is the part nobody sells.