Being ghosted on Google is a scary thought – and a real possibility.
You’re searching on Google, but your website doesn’t seem to be showing up.
Whether you set up a website yourself using an available service or invested in a professionally designed and developed website, you may be shocked when the website goes live and *poof*— it’s suddenly nowhere to be found.
Ghosting isn’t cool, especially when it’s your website that disappears without a trace or even a good-bye text. Before you panic or binge eat all your kid’s halloween candy, there may be a perfectly good reason that your website isn’t showing up on Google.
Reason 1: Crawling or indexing is blocked. 🛑
Spiders are not the only creepy-crawlies you should be aware of.
You may not realize it’s there, but there could be code on your website that is blocking search engines from crawling or indexing your site, preventing it from showing up on Google or any other search engine. It can be in the form of a “noindex” meta tag to prevent a page or certain pages to from being indexed. This could have been added by mistake, or by selecting certain preferences when setting up your website through WordPress or another CMS.
Crawling can also be blocked or discouraged accidentally or on purpose. Most websites have a robots.txt file that tells search engines where to go (and not to go) on your site. It could be blocking certain pages and you may be completely unaware. Google Search Console can help you find robot.txt errors that are blocking one or more URLs on your site.
Reason 2: Good Google things take time. ⏰
Your website may not be ghosting you on purpose.
First of all, it’s important to remember that when you type in a search, Google will be searching for an individual page, not your whole site. This means that to find the page that you’re looking for (e.g. your homepage or “site”) that the page needs to be set up correctly for Google to index it. Even if it is set up perfectly for Google to correctly crawl and index it, it does take time for new sites to be found. If you just published your site, you may need to give it anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days for the Google bot to do its work.
Reason 3: Your SEO needs a “boo”st. 👻
For any webpage or site to be searchable, it needs to be optimized.
SEO can be divided into two main categories: on-site and off-site SEO. At the very least, every page on your site should include the proper title tags, meta tags, and keywords. This is part of on-site SEO, which also relies on your site’s content for relevant keywords. Off-site SEO is an ongoing process that provides backlinks and keyword relevancy to improve your site’s overall search engine rankings.
Be proactive to prevent ghosting. 👍
There are a variety of factors that can affect your website’s search engine rankings.
These varying factors can include internal code and development issues to external issues like the mysterious Google algorithms. Achieving optimal search engine ranking begins in the development phases of your site and continues with ongoing SEO and dynamic content development. Devoting time and effort to your site’s code, content, and performance will ensure that it appears properly in search engine rankings and lessen the chance that a search leaves you ghosted, and we are happy to help.