Guru Site HealthIndexing
How to get your WordPress site indexed by Google.
Searching for your own site and finding nothing is a particular kind of sinking feeling. Usually it is one of six things, and they are worth checking in this order, because the first two block indexing outright and the rest only slow it down.
First, find out what Google actually knows
Before changing anything, ask. Search Google for:
site:yoursite.comThis lists every page of your domain that Google has indexed. Three possible answers:
- Nothing at all. Either Google has never successfully crawled you, or something is blocking it. Work through everything below.
- Some pages, not the ones you expected. Crawling works; the problem is specific pages. Skip to step 5.
- Everything, but you cannot find it by searching normally. This is not an indexing problem at all. You are indexed and ranking badly, which is a different article.
If your domain is days old, nothing is wrong. Google has to discover you before it can crawl you, and discovery for a brand-new domain with no links pointing at it can take days to weeks. Everything below shortens that; nothing eliminates it.
1. Check you are not blocking search engines
Go to Settings → Reading and look at Search engine visibility. If Discourage search engines from indexing this site is ticked, that is your answer and nothing else on this page matters until you untick it.
This one setting adds a noindex tag to every page and serves a robots.txt
that disallows everything. It is on by default after many installs and it rides along in database
migrations from staging.
The full explanation is here,
including the part most advice misses: unticking it lets crawlers back in but does not bring them.
2. Check your robots.txt and your meta robots tag
The checkbox is not the only thing that can produce a block. Check both independently:
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Disallow: / under User-agent: *
means everything is blocked.
Then view the source of your home page and search for noindex. An SEO plugin can add that
tag on its own, per post type, with the WordPress checkbox unticked. Yoast and Rank Math both have their
own visibility settings, and they win.
Finally, the invisible one: an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Nothing in WordPress will show
you this. Open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, reload, click the document
request and read the response headers. Hosts set this on staging environments and occasionally forget to
remove it.
3. Fix your permalinks before you get indexed, not after
Go to Settings → Permalinks. If you are on Plain, your URLs look like
yoursite.com/?p=123. Change to Post name.
The reason this belongs here, above submitting your sitemap, is order of operations. The URLs that get indexed are the ones you are stuck with. Changing your permalink structure after Google has indexed a few hundred ugly URLs means a few hundred redirects and a period of instability. Changing it before costs nothing.
4. Make sure you have a sitemap, and submit it
WordPress has generated a sitemap automatically since version 5.5. Check yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml.
If you use Yoast or Rank Math they replace it with their own, usually at /sitemap_index.xml.
If none of those load, something has switched sitemaps off — a plugin, a theme, or a filter.
Then verify the site in Google Search Console, which is free and is the only place Google tells you the truth about your site. Add your property, verify ownership, then Sitemaps → Add a new sitemap and submit the URL.
A sitemap does not guarantee indexing. It tells Google what exists and when it changed, which converts “eventually discovered by following a link” into “known about now”.
5. Ask for specific pages directly
This is the step that turns weeks into days, and the one most people never find.
In Search Console, use URL Inspection at the top. Paste a full URL, press Enter, and read what it says. It will tell you whether the page is indexed, when it was last crawled, whether it was blocked, and if it was excluded, why.
If it is not indexed, press Request Indexing. This puts the URL in a priority queue. It is not instant and it is not guaranteed, but for a handful of important pages it is the fastest route there is.
Do this for your home page and your three or four most important pages. There is a daily quota, so do not try to submit a hundred URLs — that is what the sitemap is for.
6. Give Google a reason to come back
Everything so far removes obstacles. This part is the only one that compounds.
Crawl frequency follows two things: whether the site changes, and whether anyone links to it.
- A site that never changes gets crawled rarely. If the last thing you published was nine months ago, Google learns that checking often is a waste of its time.
- A site nobody links to is hard to find. Links are how Google discovers pages in the first place and a substantial part of how it decides what is worth indexing.
You do not need a link-building campaign. You need the domain to exist somewhere other than itself: your own profiles, a relevant directory, the plugin or product listing if you have one, a forum you genuinely take part in. One or two real links from places that make sense is worth more than fifty from places that do not.
Things that do not help, whatever you have read
- Paid “instant indexing” services. There is no paid queue. Search Console’s Request Indexing is the queue, and it is free.
- Submitting to hundreds of search engines. A service from 2004. Google finds you by crawling links and reading sitemaps.
- Resubmitting the same sitemap repeatedly. Google re-reads it on its own schedule. Submitting it again does not reset anything.
- Meta keywords. Google has ignored them for roughly two decades.
A short diagnostic, in order
| Symptom | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| No pages indexed at all, site is months old | Search engine visibility is off, or a noindex tag |
| No pages indexed, site is days old | Normal. Submit the sitemap and request indexing |
| Home page indexed, nothing else | Sitemap missing, or no internal links to those pages |
| Pages indexed then disappeared | A noindex added later, or pages now returning errors |
| Indexed but ranking nowhere | Not an indexing problem |
| Staging site indexed instead of live | Staging was crawlable; block it and request removal |
If you would rather have the first four checks done for you, Guru Site Health flags search engine visibility, plain permalinks and a missing sitemap as findings, and can fix all three from the dashboard. It cannot submit anything to Google for you — nothing that runs on your server can, and anything claiming otherwise is selling you a queue that does not exist.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take Google to index a new WordPress site?
Typically days to a few weeks for a brand-new domain with no links pointing at it. Verifying the site in Google Search Console, submitting your sitemap and using URL Inspection to request indexing on your most important pages is the fastest legitimate route and often brings it down to days.
Why is my WordPress site not showing up on Google?
In order of likelihood: the “Discourage search engines” setting is on; an SEO plugin is adding a noindex tag; an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header is blocking it at the server; the site is too new and has not been crawled yet; or it is indexed but ranking too low for you to find it. Search site:yoursite.com to tell which.
Do I need a sitemap for Google to index my site?
Not strictly — Google can find pages by following links. But a sitemap tells it what exists and when it changed, which is much faster than waiting for discovery, and matters most for new sites and pages with few internal links. WordPress generates one automatically at /wp-sitemap.xml.
What does “Request Indexing” in Search Console actually do?
It adds the URL to a priority crawl queue. It is not instant and not guaranteed, but it is the fastest way to get a specific page looked at. There is a daily quota, so use it for your handful of important pages and let the sitemap handle the rest.
Can I pay to get indexed faster?
No. There is no paid indexing queue at Google. Services selling “instant indexing” are either using the same free Search Console mechanism you can use yourself, or doing nothing at all. The free Request Indexing feature is the fastest route available to anyone.
My staging site got indexed instead of my live site. What do I do?
Block crawlers on the staging site at the server level or with the search engine visibility setting, then use the Removals tool in Search Console on the staging property to pull the URLs out quickly. Then check that your live site is not blocked, since staging settings often travel with a database copy.
Find these on your own site in about ten seconds
Guru Site Health runs 32 checks across updates, security, database, media, accessibility and SEO, and gives you one score. Thirteen of the findings can be fixed from the dashboard in one click, and every fix can be undone. It makes no external requests — nothing about your site ever leaves it.