“My site isn’t showing up on Google” is usually said as one problem, and it is nearly always two. Either Google has not indexed the page, or it has indexed it and ranks it somewhere nobody scrolls. Those need completely different work, and Search Console is the only free tool that tells you which one you have. Here is how I read it, and what I found when I audited my own.
Indexed is not the same as ranking
Before anything else, check whether the page is in the index at all. Paste the URL into the search bar at the top of Search Console and it will tell you plainly: URL is on Google, or it is not.
If it is on Google and you still cannot find it, you do not have an indexing problem. You have a ranking problem, and no amount of resubmitting will move it. If it is not on Google, nothing else you do to that page matters until it is.
The two “not indexed” reasons worth understanding
Under Indexing → Pages, Google lists reasons pages were not indexed. Most of them are self-explanatory. Two are not, they are the two you will see most, and they mean opposite things.
- Discovered – currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists and has not visited it. This is usually a crawl-budget signal on a site with no authority yet, and it resolves with time and links rather than with anything you change on the page.
- Crawled – currently not indexed. Google visited, read the page, and decided not to include it. That is a judgement about the page. Resubmitting it will not change the judgement; making the page worth indexing might.
The second one stings, and it is the more useful of the two, because it is the only one telling you something you can act on.
Half of what it reports has already been fixed
This is the part that wastes the most time, so it is worth saying early. Search Console reports the state of the last crawl, not the state of your site. A page you fixed last week can sit in the error list for weeks afterwards.
When I audited this site, a batch of URLs were reported as 404. I went to fix them and found redirects already in place, working correctly, returning 301 to the right destinations. The report was accurate about a version of the site that no longer existed.
So before you change anything on the strength of a Search Console error, open the URL yourself. Check what the server actually returns today. I have watched people rebuild pages that were already fine.
Pages you never meant to publish
WordPress generates more URLs than most owners realise. Category archives, tag archives, author pages, date archives, attachment pages, and a feed for nearly every one of them. Left alone, each is a thin page competing with the real one.
Feeds are the ones people miss, because the usual fix does not reach them. A feed has no <head>, so a meta robots tag has nowhere to go; it has to be an X-Robots-Tag on the HTTP response instead. If you have never touched this, your site is almost certainly serving feed URLs that Google can index.
The question to ask of any generated URL is simple: if someone landed here from a search, would this page answer them? If not, it should carry noindex, and it should stay out of your sitemap.
Two kinds of property, and one of them is better
Search Console offers a URL-prefix property and a domain property. A URL-prefix property covers exactly one protocol and one hostname, so https://example.com and https://www.example.com and any subdomain are all separate properties with separate data.
A domain property covers all of them at once. It needs a DNS TXT record rather than a file or a meta tag, which is the only reason people avoid it, and it is worth the extra step. I ran this site on URL-prefix properties for months and had no idea the audit subdomain was in none of them.
One warning from setting mine up. Verification tokens are long, and a DNS panel that silently truncates the value will leave you with a record that looks correct and can never verify. Mine sat at 33 of 43 characters. If verification keeps failing, count the characters in the record as it is actually published rather than assuming it saved what you pasted.
What the sitemap is and is not for
Submit one. It costs nothing and it is how Google finds pages that nothing links to yet.
But a sitemap is a suggestion, not an instruction. Listing a page does not get it indexed, and a page missing from the sitemap can still be indexed if something links to it. If a URL is in your sitemap and not in the index, the sitemap is not the problem.
The one thing a sitemap does reliably is expose contradictions. A URL listed in the sitemap while carrying noindex is telling Google two opposite things, and that is worth finding.
The report nobody opens
Most people open Search Console to look at Performance, see the graph is low, and close it. The number underneath is the one that matters: average position, per query.
A query sitting at position 8 to 15 is a page Google already considers relevant and has not quite committed to. That is the cheapest work available, far cheaper than a new page starting from nothing. A query at position 38 is a different matter, and worth being honest about: this site’s own brand name sat around there, which told me plainly that nothing was searching for it yet.
None of this is fast. Indexing changes take days, ranking changes take months, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. But the difference between “not indexed” and “indexed at position 40” is the difference between two entirely different jobs, and knowing which one you have is free.
If the answer turns out to be a ranking problem, that usually comes back to the technical ground covered in 5 technical SEO fixes that actually move rankings, and it is the same ground a performance audit starts from.