seo

October 12, 2026seositesnextjs

Why your site does not show up on Google (I audited mine and found out)

I audited hmdeveloper.com.br and found why Google had indexed nothing: three h1s on the home page, landing pages that never reached production, and no Search Console.

In August 2026, I searched Google for site:hmdeveloper.com.br. There were no results. Bing had three indexed URLs. My site had existed for months, with original content and Next.js 15, ISR (incremental page generation), and an automatic sitemap (a list of site pages). Still, the planet's largest search engine did not show it.

I decided to review my own site. I found mistakes any small business can make. They were all fixable in an afternoon.

What was wrong

1. I had no Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool for telling Google your site exists. You can submit your sitemap, check which pages were indexed, and receive error alerts. Without it, Google may still find your site through external links.

I had not registered the domain. Google did not know about the sitemap or the site's pages. It had no reason to index them.

2. The home page had three `<h1>` tags

The home page had three <h1> headings. The component showing blog post covers in the "Latest articles" section created an <h1> inside each card. The page already had its own <h1>, and the cards added more.

Crawlers are programs that read pages for search engines. They use heading levels to understand the structure. Three <h1> tags can confuse Google about the page's main topic. They can also look like an attempt to repeat keywords.

3. The service pages were not indexed

The service pages (/en/services/custom-web-systems, /en/services/ecommerce, and four more) existed in the code. But they were on the feature/services-pages branch, a separate line of work that was never merged into production. Google found the home page and blog, nothing else.

For a site that sells services, these pages should appear in search results. They explain what you do, who you serve, and what results you deliver. Without them, Google has no content to show for important searches.

4. There was no llms.txt

Traditional search engines use robots.txt and sitemap.xml. Language models and AI crawlers, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, are starting to use llms.txt. This file describes the site in a format models can read. I did not have one.

5. The dates were inconsistent

Some pages had no useful lastModified value in the sitemap. Google considers content updates when judging relevance. A page that never changes may look abandoned.

The fix order (for an SMB)

If your site does not show up on Google, this is the order that worked for me:

Register Search Console and submit the sitemap. Without this, Google works without that information. It is free, takes 10 minutes, and everything else depends on it.
Use one <h1> per page. Check the generated HTML. If a component creates another <h1>, change it to a <div> or <p> with the same visual style. Readers will not notice, but crawlers will.
Give each page its own title and description. The <title> appears in the search result. The description appears below it. If every page has the same title, Google picks a random excerpt, and rarely gets it right.
Use JSON-LD, a format that describes the type of page content. Each type has a schema, or description template: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Article. JSON-LD does not directly improve ranking, but it enables rich results with stars, questions, and breadcrumbs, which show the path to the page. These results raise the click-through rate.
Create one page for each service. If you offer three services, each needs a page with a descriptive URL, a specific title, and content that answers what a customer would search for on Google.
Publish content regularly. A blog with two posts from six months ago looks abandoned. You do not need to post every week. One good article a month, kept up for six months, already changes the freshness signal.
Measure before buying traffic. Once visits from search appear in Search Console, you will know which terms bring people in. Then it makes sense to pay for ads to grow what works, instead of sending visits to a site Google ignores.

Where it breaks

SEO, improving a site so it appears in search, takes months, not days. A common mistake is to make a fix, wait a week, and decide it failed. Google can take weeks to index a site again after a major change. Search Console shows progress. Watch that data, not your anxiety.

If your site does not show up and you want to fix it, tell me what is going on.