You published a page. Two weeks later, it's still not in Google's index. site:yoursite.com/your-page returns nothing. What's going on?

"Google isn't indexing my pages" is the most common SEO complaint, and the cause is almost never random. Here's the diagnostic checklist we run, in order.

1. Check the basics

Open Google Search Console → URL Inspection → paste the URL. What does Google actually say?

  • "URL is on Google" — you're done. It just hasn't ranked yet.
  • "Crawled — currently not indexed" — Google saw it, decided not to keep it. Content quality issue.
  • "Discovered — currently not indexed" — Google knows the URL exists but hasn't crawled it. Crawl-budget or signal issue.
  • "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" — you (or a plugin) told Google not to index it.

2. The noindex trap

Maybe 30% of "won't index" issues turn out to be an accidental <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag — usually added by a CMS template or a plugin you forgot about. View source, search for "noindex", remove if present.

3. Robots.txt blocking

If your robots.txt has Disallow: /your-path, Google literally cannot crawl the page. Check it at yoursite.com/robots.txt.

4. Canonical points elsewhere

If the page has <link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/some-other-url">, Google thinks your URL is a duplicate of the canonical and will index the canonical instead.

5. Thin or duplicate content

"Crawled — currently not indexed" usually means Google decided the page isn't worth keeping. Common causes: very short pages, scraped/auto-generated content, or near-duplicates of pages already in the index.

6. Crawl budget exhausted

On big sites (10k+ pages), Google rations how much it crawls per visit. If your sitemap dumps 50,000 URLs but only 100 are crawled per day, new pages wait in line.

7. The site is too new or too quiet

Brand-new domains and low-authority sites simply get crawled less often. Build a few links, share new posts publicly, and use the Indexing API to nudge Google.

The shortcut

Once you've fixed the underlying issue, don't wait for the next natural crawl. Submit the URL through the Indexing API. Then verify with URL Inspection. That's the whole loop GIndex automates for you.