Search your trade and your town and your site is nowhere. That is almost never because Google dislikes you. It is one of four boring technical faults: a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, a sitemap full of pages Google will not index, or pages too thin to bother with. All four show up in Google Search Console, which is free, and three of them you can fix yourself in an evening. Here is how to find yours, in the order to check.
The one minute test
Open Google and search site:yourdomain.co.uk. Zero results means Google has not put a single page in its index. That is a plumbing problem, not a popularity problem. A brand new site takes days to weeks to be crawled, and the UK copywriting agency Crafty Copy warns it can take up to six months for Google to notice a site at all, so patience is part of the fix. But most sites that fail this test have a switch flipped somewhere.
The noindex trap
noindex is an instruction that tells Google to keep a page out of its index. It is useful on thank you pages and behind login screens, and it is a disaster when it lands on pages that should rank. It gets there by accident more often than you would think: the “discourage search engines” checkbox in WordPress, the Advanced tab in Yoast, a leftover coming soon plugin, or code injected site-wide into a Squarespace site. Squarespace’s own help pages tell customers to check exactly these things, along with site-wide passwords, which block Googlebot entirely.
Search Console names the damage: the Pages report under Indexing lists every URL excluded by a noindex tag. Untick the setting, delete the tag, request indexing, and the page becomes eligible again within days.
The robots.txt block
robots.txt is a set of do not crawl signs. One misplaced line blocks whole folders, and some builders ship a robots.txt that is stricter than the marketing page suggests. The same Pages report shows pages blocked by robots.txt. Staging sites and password protected builds are the silent version of this: Googlebot sees a locked door and moves on.
The sitemap is a hint, not a command
Most small business sites are submitted to Google through a sitemap, and most owners assume that means Google will index those pages. Google’s own documentation is blunt: sitemaps are hints, not directives. Submit a sitemap full of thin pages and Search Console shows the status “submitted URL not indexed”: Google knows the page exists and has decided it is not worth keeping.
A technical SEO audit published in 2026 found a small content site with 140 pages in its sitemap but only 85 in the index. The missing pages had one internal link each and sat five clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was fine. The structure was not.
Thin pages and missing links
Google decides a page is not worth indexing for two main reasons. Thin content is the first: a page with a paragraph of boilerplate and a contact form is a page Google has seen ten thousand times. The second is links. A page linked from the homepage and from two service pages gets crawled constantly. A page linked once, from a footer, sits in the discovered but not indexed queue for months. If your service pages only have the menu pointing at them, that is the fix.
| Search Console status | What it means | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Excluded by noindex tag | A tag tells Google to skip the page | Remove the tag, request indexing |
| Blocked by robots.txt | A crawl rule stops Googlebot | Edit or delete the rule |
| Submitted URL not indexed | Google saw the sitemap and passed | Real content and better internal links |
| Discovered, currently not indexed | Google has not crawled it yet | Link to it from the homepage |
| Crawled, currently not indexed | Crawled and judged not worth it | Rewrite the page with specifics |
| Indexed but zero impressions | In the index, ranking nowhere | Rewrite title and copy for real search terms |
What you can do tonight
Verify the site in Search Console, which takes ten minutes and needs a DNS record or an HTML file. Submit the sitemap and read the Pages report. Then work through the list in order: delete noindex tags, unblock robots.txt, remove pages that do not deserve indexing because they dilute the ones that do, and add two or three internal links from the homepage to every service page. Then write a few hundred words of specifics on each: what you charge, where you work, what a job actually looks like. No plugin, no consultant, no budget.
What is worth paying for
A one off technical audit is worth paying for when you have worked through the list and the Pages report still shows hundreds of excluded URLs, because that usually means a structural problem rather than a switch. Monthly SEO retainers are mostly wasted on a one van business: you are paying someone to chase rankings that a well built five page site earns on its own. The SEO work that matters is fixed, not monthly: titles, descriptions, schema, a clean sitemap and submission to Search Console. We price that into our builds as a visible £100 add-on rather than a mystery retainer, because it is one off work and should be priced like it.
Google ignoring you is almost always plumbing, not punishment. The free Pages report names the fault, and most faults are a switch, a rule, or a page that was never worth indexing in the first place.
What to do now
Open Search Console tonight and read the Pages report before you buy anything. If the biggest line says “excluded by noindex tag”, you have found your problem and the fix costs nothing. That one report explains more mystery disappearances than any SEO subscription will.