Why Isn’t My Website Listed On Google?
Following on from a recent post discussing how you can tell whether your website has been listed by the search engines, (If you haven’t read it, here is the link – Does Google know that my website exists?) I recently found a website which does not appear in the Google listing even after submitting a sitemap. So I asked the obvious question, why?
The answer was quite suprising… in the code for the home page of this website I found the following instruction:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”/>
The instruction “noindex” tells Google not to add this web page to it’s index. If you have a business website, this is the last thing you want. This website was a DIY website, created by the business themselves. Until this instruction is removed, this business will not feature in search results.
There is a handy online tool that you can use to check whether your site has this issue and it’s free to use – https://www.siteguru.co/free-seo-tools/noindex
If your website does not appear in Google Search results, I highly recommend using this tool to check that your website isn’t accidentally blocked from being indexed, by the “robots” code in your website.