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Your site is deployed and Google does not know it exists

DISCOVERY · Indexing

The site is live. It has been live for weeks. Searching for its exact domain name returns nothing, and none of the pages appear for anything.

This is not slowness. In most cases there is simply no path by which Google would ever find out the site exists.

Deploying is not announcing

Publishing to a host makes a site reachable. It does not notify any search engine. Google finds new sites by following links from pages it already crawls, and a brand new domain with no inbound links has none. It can sit there indefinitely.

The minimum that actually creates an indexing path

1. Register the site in Google Search Console and verify it. Nothing else on this list substitutes for it.
2. Submit your sitemap at Indexing, Sitemaps. Enter the full URL, for example https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. You want the status to read Success with a page count that matches what you expect.
3. Confirm robots.txt is not blocking you. A stray Disallow: / left over from staging will quietly undo everything else.
4. Use URL Inspection on two or three important pages and request indexing to prime the process.

What does not work

IndexNow does not reach Google. It is genuinely useful, it needs no account, and Bing and Yandex both consume it. Google does not participate. If IndexNow is your only submission route, your Google indexing path is still zero. Use it in addition to Search Console, never instead of it.

Meta keywords do nothing. They have been ignored for well over a decade.

Waiting is not a strategy when there is no route in. Time only helps once a path exists.

Realistic expectations once it is set up

Verification is immediate. Sitemap processing usually happens within a day or two. Initial indexing of a small site typically lands within one to two weeks. Ranking for anything competitive takes considerably longer and is a separate problem from being indexed at all.

Check progress in Search Console under Indexing, Pages, rather than by searching Google manually. The report distinguishes between pages that are indexed, pages Google chose not to index, and pages it never discovered, and those three cases need completely different responses.