After your website has been created, the next critical step in your overall digital marketing strategy is to optimize your website and improve its search ranking on Google search results through SEO tactics such as SEO Canada, SEO Vancouver, Toronto SEO, or Ottawa SEO. If you search for your website on Google search results and you cannot find your site, there are four main reasons why your website isn’t appearing on Google search results. Here’s why.
1. Your website is too new
It takes Google several days or possibly a few weeks to find a website that’s newly developed and display the website on Google search results. If you just launched your website, wait a bit for your website to be found and shown on Google search results.
2. Your website has been blocked on Google search results
‘Noindex’ is a meta tag that tells crawlers such as Googlebots not to display a webpage on Google search results. If you have set ‘noindex’ to your entire website or certain webpages, the entire website or these pages will not appear on search results.
To deter this issue from happening, make sure that webpages that you want to appear on search results don’t have ‘noindex’ in its meta tag.
3. Your website content needs more relevant keywords
Google uses keywords on your website to gain textual understanding of your products or services, and will display your website on search results accordingly . If you don’t include relevant keywords, your website won’t appear on search results for related queries.
4. Your website has been penalized
If you have engaged in “unethical” or “black hat” SEO tactics, your website may be penalized and not appear on Google search results. Purchasing low-quality backlinks or stuffing your website content with keywords are unethical SEO practices that will be penalized by Google. The best way to identify whether your website has been slapped with penalization due to poor SEO practices is through a comprehensive SEO audit.
5. Your website doesn’t have enough quality backlinks
The number of quality backlinks your website has tells Google the importance of your website. The more backlinks your website generates, the more the website appears important to Google and the more likely that Google will display your website on Google search results Conversely, if your website is new and doesn’t have many backlinks, the website may seem unimportant to Google which leads to the website not appearing on Google search results.
6. The website has duplicate content issues
Duplicate content is when the same or similar web page is accessible at different URLs.
Google tends not to index duplicate content because it takes up unnecessary space in their index—a bit like having two copies of the same book on your bookshelf.
Instead, it usually only indexes the version that you set as the canonical.
If no canonical is set, Google attempts to identify the best version of the page to index itself.
If your content is similar to another website’s content, there’s a good chance that your website will not appear on Google search results.
