More fixes

WordPress site not showing up on Google

You search Google for your own business name and your website is not there, even though it has been live for weeks. Or it used to show and has vanished. Most of the time this is not about "SEO" at all: something on the site is telling Google to stay away, and a single setting or file is usually the cause. Below is a rebuilt example (not a real client), then the four checks that find the cause in about ten minutes, and the fix for each one.

Not found, or just not first?

Two different problems look alike. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com (no space after the colon). If that shows your pages, Google has them and the problem is ranking: you are listed, just below other businesses for the words you tried. If it shows nothing, or only one or two old pages, Google has been kept out or has not found the site, and the checks below apply. For a local business, also check that you have a Google Business Profile: the map listing often shows above every website.

The four checks (about ten minutes)

1. The "discourage" box. In the dashboard, Settings, Reading, look at "Search engine visibility". If "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is ticked, WordPress tells Google to leave every page out. Developers tick it while building the site and it is very often still ticked after launch. Many hosts tick it on a fresh install or a staging copy that is later made live.
2. A noindex tag on the page. Open your home page, right-click, View page source, and search (Ctrl+F) for noindex. A line such as <meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow'> keeps that page out of Google. It comes from the box above, from an SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO each have a per-page and a per-content-type "show in search results" setting), or from a coming-soon or maintenance plugin.
3. robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. The line Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks every crawler from every page. It is usually a real file left over from a staging copy, uploaded by hand or written by a plugin.
4. Google's own answer. In Google Search Console (free, verify the site once), paste your home page address into URL Inspection. It says in plain words why a page is not indexed: "Excluded by 'noindex' tag", "Blocked by robots.txt", "Page with redirect", "Alternate page with proper canonical tag", "Discovered - currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed". The Pages report lists the same reasons for the whole site.

The fix for each cause

1. Box ticked: untick it in Settings, Reading and save. On a site with a caching plugin or host cache, clear the cache afterwards, or Google keeps seeing the old tag.
2. noindex from a plugin: in the SEO plugin, open the home page and your main pages, set "Allow search engines to show this page in search results" (or the plugin's version of it) to Yes, and check the plugin's global settings for Pages and Posts. Turn off any coming-soon or maintenance mode: those return a "come back later" answer to Google too.
3. robots.txt: edit or delete the file (by SFTP, the host's file manager, or the SEO plugin's file editor). Removing Disallow: / is enough; an empty file or no file means "everything allowed". Add a line naming your sitemap.
4. Wrong canonical or redirect: if URL Inspection says the page points somewhere else, look for an old or staging address in Settings, General (both site addresses), in the SEO plugin's canonical field, and in redirects. Pages should point at themselves on the live address.
5. Then tell Google. In Search Console, submit your sitemap under Sitemaps (WordPress has one at /wp-sitemap.xml; Yoast and Rank Math use /sitemap_index.xml), then use URL Inspection, Request indexing on the home page and two or three main pages. Pages usually start appearing within a few days to two weeks.

What you see, what it means, what it needs

What not to do

• Do not buy an "SEO package" before running the four checks. No amount of keywords helps a site that tells Google to stay out.
• Do not press Request indexing over and over. Once is enough; repeating it does not move you up the queue.
• Do not copy a staging site to live without re-checking the box and robots.txt afterwards. That is how most sites end up here.

The fix itself is usually a few minutes once the cause is known; finding it is the part people get stuck on. If you would rather hand it over, that is what the box below is for. Related: Google shows the wrong words under your name, a home page with no title and a site stuck in maintenance mode.