What happens between publishing a page and appearing in Google?
Four steps, and a page can stall at any of them. Google Search Central's "In-depth guide to how Google Search works" describes three stages, crawling, indexing and serving results, with discovery before them:
Google finds new pages mostly by following links from pages it already knows, and from sitemaps you submit. It then fetches the page, renders it as a browser would, and decides whether to keep it. The guide is blunt that Google does not guarantee it will crawl, index or serve any page.
Why would Google crawl a page and then leave it out?
Because indexing is a choice. Google may skip a page that repeats another page on the site, says very little, or carries a noindex tag telling it to stay out. Search Console's Page indexing report lists these, with statuses such as "Crawled, currently not indexed" (Google fetched it and chose not to keep it for now) and "Discovered, currently not indexed" (Google knows the address and has not fetched it yet). On a small site, a handful of pages in those groups is normal. Your important pages sitting there is not.
How did a Mount Gambier builder's new website vanish from Google? (example figures)
A home builder in Mount Gambier with a team of eight launched a new WordPress website in March, with 14 pages of house designs. The old site had brought in about 9 enquiries a month from Google's free results. In April it brought 1, and in May none.
The Page indexing report showed every page as "Excluded by noindex tag". The developer had built the site with WordPress's "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box ticked, as is normal while a site is unfinished, and nobody unticked it at launch. One click in Settings, then Reading, fixed it, followed by a sitemap submitted in Search Console. Within three weeks the main pages were back in the index. The two lost months cost around 17 enquiries, which at one build in ten is close to two lost contracts.
How do you check whether a page is indexed?
Paste its address into the URL Inspection tool at the top of Google Search Console. It says whether the page is in Google's index and, if not, why, and offers Request indexing once you have fixed the cause. The Page indexing report shows the whole site at once, and the Sitemaps report shows whether Google could read the sitemap you submitted.
Where would CoraVision notice an indexing problem?
CoraVision would see an indexing problem first as a fall in organic search visits, which it reads from Google Analytics 4 every night, so a website launch that drops out of Google shows up within days. The cause lives in Search Console's Page indexing report, which you and Cora look at together in a session you start. The fix, often a single setting, is yours to make.
Questions
How long does Google take to index a new page?
There is no fixed time. A page on a site Google already visits often can be indexed within days; a page on a new site with no links to it can wait weeks. Submitting a sitemap and using Request indexing in Search Console can speed things up, but Google decides.
Does a robots.txt file keep a page out of Google?
No. Robots.txt asks Google not to crawl a page, and a page Google cannot crawl can still be indexed if other pages link to it, just without its content. To keep a page out of the results, let Google crawl it and add a noindex tag.