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Why your site might not show up on Google at all
If you search for your own site on Google and nothing comes up, one of four things is usually going on: Google has not crawled it yet, the site is accidentally blocked from Indexing, individual pages carry a noindex tag, or the site is too new and thin for Google to rank it for anything yet. All four are fixable once you know which one you are dealing with.
Start with a quick test. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If pages come back, Google has indexed at least part of the site and the real problem is ranking, not discovery. If nothing comes back at all, something is blocking crawling or indexing.
If nothing is indexed, set up Google Search Console, verify the domain, and submit a Sitemap so Google knows which pages exist. From there, use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing on the pages that matter most. If pages are indexed but still not appearing, check the page source for a noindex tag and check Robots.txt for a Disallow rule blocking the page. Both are common leftovers from a site build and easy to remove once you find them.
Traffic dropped suddenly? Check whether it is a penalty or an algorithm update
A sudden drop in traffic gets called a "Google penalty" a lot, but a real manual action and an algorithmic ranking change are different problems with different fixes. Mixing them up wastes time.
A manual action is a deliberate decision by a human reviewer on Google's spam team, and it always shows up as a notice inside Search Console under Security & Manual Actions. If that section is empty, there is no manual penalty. Whatever caused the drop is algorithmic or technical instead.
Manual actions are usually triggered by unnatural links, thin or duplicate content, hidden text, cloaking, or misleading Schema Markup. The fix depends on the cause: removing or disavowing bad backlinks, rewriting thin pages, or correcting misleading structured data. An algorithmic drop has a different fix entirely, usually tied to a broader update in how Google is weighing quality, relevance, or E-E-A-T signals across the whole site.
Broken links quietly hurt more than you think
A broken link sends a visitor to a page that no longer exists, usually a 404. They happen naturally as pages get renamed, deleted, or moved, and as external sites you linked to restructure their own URLs. A handful will not tank your rankings, but a large, accumulating pile signals to Google that a site is not being maintained.
Google Search Console is the first place to check: go to Indexing → Pages and look for a "Not Found" status. For a full crawl of your own site, Screaming Frog is free for up to 500 URLs and follows every link the way Google does, flagging every 4xx error and showing which page it came from.
The fix depends on the cause. If a page moved, update the link to the new URL directly. If a page was deleted, set up a 301 redirect to the closest relevant replacement, since this passes most of the SEO value from the old URL forward instead of losing it. Make redirecting a habit every time you change or delete a URL, and it never has a chance to build up.
Why your site loads slowly, and what actually fixes it
Start by measuring with PageSpeed Insights rather than guessing. It takes about 30 seconds and gives a mobile and desktop score with specific issues to address, usually centered on Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (how long the main content takes to appear), Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps around while loading), and Interaction to Next Paint (how fast it responds to a click or tap).
On most smaller sites, oversized images are the single biggest cause. A photo straight from a phone can be 5 to 10 megabytes; the same image only needs to be 100 to 300 kilobytes on a web page. A free tool like Squoosh lets you resize to around 1200 pixels wide and compress to about 80 percent quality right in the browser, with barely any visible difference.
After images, check for third-party scripts you no longer need, chat widgets, unused tracking pixels, extra font weights, since each one adds its own request on every page load. Aim for your main content to load within 2.5 seconds on mobile and a PageSpeed score of 90 or above. Most sites hit that with image optimization alone.
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