Edip Kilinc is the founder of Webwavers. Together with his team, he develops websites, brands, and digital presences for ambitious companies – with over 250 completed projects and accolades including the German Design Award 2026.
"We are not on Google" means two very different things in practice, and they have different causes.
The page is not in the index at all. It does not appear even if you search for it specifically. This is almost always technical.
The page is in the index, but not findable. It appears when searching for the company name, but not when searching for the service. This is almost never technical.
The test takes ten seconds: Type site:yourdomain.de into Google. If a list of results appears, the page is in the index. If nothing appears, it is not.
Depending on the result, the following sections apply – the first four for "not in the index", the last three for "not findable".
"We are not on Google" means two very different things in practice, and they have different causes.
The page is not in the index at all. It does not appear even if you search for it specifically. This is almost always technical.
The page is in the index, but not findable. It appears when searching for the company name, but not when searching for the service. This is almost never technical.
The test takes ten seconds: Type site:yourdomain.de into Google. If a list of results appears, the page is in the index. If nothing appears, it is not.
Depending on the result, the following sections apply – the first four for "not in the index", the last three for "not findable".
The most common and harmless reason. A new website or a new subpage takes time for search engines to find, crawl, and index. A few days to several weeks is common.
This can be speeded up: Set up the Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and request a review for the most important pages. This does not replace linking, but it noticeably shortens the waiting time.
What also helps: at least one link from an already known website. A business directory, a partner company, an article in a specialist medium. Without any incoming links, indexing takes significantly longer.
The most common technical reason – and it usually originates from the development phase. During construction, the page is deliberately blocked for search engines, and when going live, someone forgets to remove the block.
Three places where this happens:
The robots.txt file. Call up yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it says Disallow: / there, the entire website is blocked.
The noindex tag. Search for noindex in the source code of a page. If it is there, the page will not be indexed – even if it is accessible.
A setting in the system. Many systems have an option like "block search engines". It is quickly enabled and rarely reset.
This is the point where the greatest damage can be repaired with the least effort.
Missing redirects after a relaunch. If URLs have changed and the old ones do not point to the new ones, you lose all the visibility you have built up. The old addresses return an error, the new ones are unknown. This is the most expensive avoidable mistake in the entire relaunch.
This can be checked in the Search Console under the coverage reports – errors will appear there as soon as search engines crawl the old addresses again.
The same page under multiple addresses. With and without www, with and without https, with and without a trailing slash. Technically, these are different addresses. If it is not clear which one is valid, the strength is distributed across several variants instead of concentrating on one.
The solution in both cases is the same: one unique destination address, everything else redirects there.
From here on, we are talking about pages that are in the index but cannot be found.
The page answers a different question. Anyone who searches for "Testing systems for suppliers" and lands on a page called "Our Competencies" that talks generally about quality has not found what they were looking for. Search engines recognize this – not by the text alone, but by the behavior of the visitors.
The comparison is simple: search for your target term and look at the first five results. What questions do they answer? Does your page answer the same questions, or does it talk about something else?
The search term is too competitive. A new website will not rank for "web design". However, it can very well rank for "testing systems for automotive suppliers". The more specific the term, the more realistic the goal – and the more qualified the visitors.
This is not a stopgap solution, but the better strategy: ten specific terms with twenty search queries each bring in more orders than a general term where you are on page four.
Even a technically flawless page with appropriate content needs signals indicating that it is relevant. These signals come from other websites.
This does not mean that you should buy links – that tends to do more harm than good. It means that obvious sources should be utilized: business directories, association memberships, partner pages, supplier lists, the company profile on Google, and trade media in which you already appear anyway.
This is tedious, unspectacular work. However, for most companies, it is the area with the greatest untapped potential – simply because no one has ever taken care of it systematically.
The order of tasks to work through: first check indexation, then blocks, then redirects, then duplicates, then content, then search terms, then references. In this order, you will find the cause the fastest.
