If your website used to show up in Google and now doesn't, or never showed up to begin with, here's the order-of-operations diagnostic for Canadian small businesses.
**Problem A: Site has never shown up.** Usually a discovery, indexability, or technical issue. See our website-not-appearing diagnostic.
**Problem B: Site used to show up and now doesn't.** Something specific changed — a recent redesign, a CMS migration, a new robots.txt, a manual action, an algorithm update, or a hosting/DNS issue. Different process.
This page is about Problem B — the 'I used to be there, now I'm not' problem.
1. **Open Google Search Console.** Pages report → look for a sudden drop in indexed pages. Manual Actions report → check for any flag. 2. **Check site availability.** Open the site in a private window. If it errors, the problem is upstream of Google. 3. **Check robots.txt and noindex.** Most common 'sudden disappearance' cause: someone deployed a staging robots.txt or noindex tag to production by accident. 4. **Check the date of the drop.** Cross-reference against any code/CMS changes, hosting migrations, or domain configuration changes you made around that date. 5. **Cross-check against a known Google update date.** If your drop coincides with a confirmed Google update (the SEO press tracks these by date), the cause may be algorithm-related, not technical.
From the cases we triage in our Ottawa practice, these five causes account for the overwhelming majority of sudden-disappearance incidents. Order is roughly by frequency in our experience; not Google data.
**1. Accidental robots.txt or noindex deployment** — staging configurations leaked into production. Easiest to fix; hardest to spot if you don't know to look.
**2. CMS migration losing redirects** — old URLs returned 404 or got blanket-redirected to homepage instead of mapped 1:1. Google deindexes 404s and treats blanket redirects as soft-404s.
**3. HTTPS/HTTP migration done partially** — some pages on https, some on http, no consistent canonicalization. Google sees duplicate content and deindexes one or both versions.
**4. Hosting or DNS misconfiguration** — site loads inconsistently, sometimes errors, Googlebot's crawl attempts hit errors and Google gradually deindexes.
**5. Algorithm update or manual action** — site is fine technically but Google's quality model has decided your content is no longer worth ranking. Different fix entirely; covered under our content-quality service.
Always fix in this order regardless of what you suspect the cause is:
1. Confirm site is reachable from multiple geographies (use a free tool like uptime-monitor or just ask a friend in another city). 2. Confirm robots.txt allows crawling and pages don't have noindex. 3. Submit sitemap.xml in Search Console. 4. Use URL Inspection in Search Console on 5-10 representative URLs and request indexing. 5. Wait 7-14 days for Google to recrawl. 6. If still not back, escalate to content/quality investigation.
No — there is no such thing as a 'GBP reseller'. Google Business Profile is a free Google product. We're an Ottawa-based SEO agency that manages, audits, optimizes, and helps recover GBP listings for Canadian businesses as part of our local-SEO service. Anyone selling you a 'partner' badge for GBP specifically is misrepresenting Google's program.
No legitimate agency will guarantee local-pack rankings. The local pack is driven by relevance, prominence, and proximity — proximity in particular is outside any agency's control because Google computes it relative to the searcher. We can dramatically improve relevance and prominence signals (categories, services, attributes, reviews, citations, links) but no one can move the searcher closer to your address.
Profile-level changes (categories, services, attributes, photos, posts) often show within days. Review-related signals shift over weeks. Local-pack ranking improvements typically show in 4-12 weeks depending on competitive density of your category and city. Recovering a suspended profile can take 1-6 weeks depending on the suspension reason.