Can't find your site in Qwant's search results? Here's a step-by-step diagnosis.
Step 1 — Check That Your Site Is Accessible
- Does your site respond without errors from any browser?
- Is it accessible without login, without a maintenance page, without geographic restrictions?
A site that is not publicly accessible cannot be indexed.
Step 2 — Check Your robots.txt File
Visit https://your-site.com/robots.txt and verify that it does not explicitly block the QwantBot robot.
User-agent: QwantBot Disallow: /
Additionally, a robots.txt containing User-agent: * followed by Disallow: / blocks all robots, including Qwant.
Step 3 — Check Your Meta Tags
Inspect the HTML code of your main pages and look for:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
The value "noindex" within the "content" attribute of the meta HTML tag for "robots" prevents the page from being indexed. If it is present on your entire site (often by mistake during development), your pages will not appear.
Step 4 — Check Your Site's Freshness
If your site is very new, it might not yet be in our index. To speed this up:
- Publish a sitemap.xml.
- Obtain incoming links from sites already indexed.
Step 5 — Test with the site: Operator
Search on Qwant:
site:your-site.com
If pages appear, your site is indexed, and the issue is ranking, not indexing. If no pages appear, your site is not indexed.
Step 6 — Check Site Quality
Several factors can hinder indexing or ranking:
- Duplicate content across multiple pages.
- Very long loading times.
- Site flagged as suspicious by reputation databases.
- Abusive SEO techniques.
If Nothing Works
Contact the Qwant team via the user form, specifying your site's URL, the diagnosis you performed, and the date it was published.