You publish a page on your WordPress site and check Google a week later — nothing. No listing, no snippet, as if the page does not exist. Indexing failures are one of the most common SEO problems, and they almost always have a specific, fixable cause. Work through each of these checks in order before concluding there is a broader problem.
Check 1: The Search Engine Visibility setting in WordPress
Go to Settings → Reading in your WordPress dashboard. At the bottom, there is an option that reads "Search Engine Visibility: Discourage search engines from indexing this site." If this checkbox is ticked, WordPress adds a noindex tag to every page on your site. Untick it and save. This single setting causes more indexing failures than anything else — it is frequently left ticked after development.
Check 2: Page-level noindex settings in your SEO plugin
Open the specific page in your WordPress editor. Scroll to your SEO plugin meta box (Yoast, Rank Math or similar). Under the Advanced tab, check the robots meta setting for that page. It should be set to index. If a page was manually set to noindex during development or by mistake, this is where you will find it.
WordPress SEO services →Check 3: robots.txt is not blocking your pages
Open /robots.txt on your domain. Check for any Disallow: / rule — this blocks all pages. Also check for more targeted Disallow rules that may be blocking specific directories. Any URL blocked in robots.txt will not be crawled or indexed by Google. After editing robots.txt, use Google Search Console → robots.txt Tester to verify your changes.
Check 4: Canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL
A canonical tag tells Google which version of a URL is the definitive one. If a page has a canonical tag pointing to a different URL — a common issue after migration or when duplicate page structures exist — Google will credit the canonical URL and not index the page you are looking at. Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to see which canonical Google is reading.
Check 5: Thin or duplicate content
Google chooses not to index pages it considers low-value. Very short pages, pages that largely duplicate content found elsewhere on the site, or auto-generated pages with little original content are frequently excluded from the index. If a page has fewer than 300 words of unique content, expand it substantially before expecting Google to index it.
Check 6: Request indexing via Google Search Console
Once you have resolved any technical issues, go to Google Search Console → URL Inspection, enter the page URL and click Request Indexing. This queues the page for Googlebot to crawl within hours rather than days. You can submit up to a few hundred URL inspection requests per day. For large batches, resubmit your XML sitemap instead.
ImportantIf you have fixed all technical issues and pages are still not being indexed after several weeks, the problem may be domain authority. Brand new sites take longer to have all their pages indexed — Google prioritises crawling and indexing high-authority sites more frequently. Building backlinks from reputable UK sites accelerates this process significantly.