My site is indexed but does not show for searches. Is that a technical problem?

Usually not. If the Search Console indexing report shows the pages as indexed, the problem is relevance or authority — content, intent, links — not crawlability. See the content lesson.

How long until Google indexes a new page?

Anywhere from hours to weeks, depending on how often Google crawls your site. An internal link from an important page and URL inspection in Search Console speed it up; there is no guaranteed timeline.

Can I use 302 redirects for a migration?

Use 301. Google eventually treats 302s as permanent too, but 301 says explicitly that the move is final and avoids any ambiguity.

The technical SEO foundation: what has to work before any

New site, zero traffic

A clinic in Cluj launches a new, prettier website. Two weeks later, bookings coming from Google drop by half. Nobody changed the content. The URLs changed, the old pages return 404, and the robots.txt file — copied from the staging environment — blocks the whole site. Google could no longer find anything it had indexed over three years.

That is technical SEO: not keywords, but the conditions under which Google (and, increasingly, AI systems) can reach your pages, understand them and show them. If the foundation is broken, every good piece of content is invisible.

Crawlability: can Google reach the pages?

Three files and one tag decide this:

robots.txt — at yoursite.com/robots.txt. It tells bots what they may and may not access. One wrong line (Disallow: /) hides the entire site. Check it after every launch.
XML sitemap — the list of pages you want indexed, with last-modified dates. You submit it in Search Console. It should contain only canonical URLs that return 200 — no redirects, no deleted pages.
Canonical — the <link rel="canonical"> tag says which version of a page is the "official" one when duplicates exist (with or without www, with filter parameters, with a trailing /). Without it, Google splits signals between the copies.
Internal links — Google discovers pages by following links. A page nothing links to (an "orphan") is indexed slowly and ranks poorly. Every important page needs links from the menu, from related pages or from the footer.

Indexability: is Google allowed to show it?

Crawlable does not mean indexed. A noindex tag left over from development, a page that redirects in a chain, an intermittent server error — all of them remove pages from the index without anyone noticing.

The source of truth is Google Search Console, the page indexing report. It shows how many pages are indexed, how many are not, and the reason for each: blocked by robots.txt, page with redirect, crawled but not indexed. Read it monthly. For any important new page, use URL inspection and request indexing.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures real user experience through three metrics — Core Web Vitals:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how long until the main element appears. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how quickly the page responds to a tap. Target: under 200 ms. It replaced FID in 2024.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the content "jumps" while loading. Target: under 0.1.

As a ranking factor, Core Web Vitals matter a little: with comparable content, the faster page has a small edge. As a conversion factor, they matter enormously: on a phone, on an ordinary mobile connection, every extra second loses visitors before they see the offer. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console shows real data from Chrome users, not a lab test — that is the one to rely on.

Mobile-first

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If sections are missing on mobile, text is hidden or the menu does not open, then for Google that is your site. The simple test: open every important page on your phone, not on a monitor.

Clean URLs and migrations without losses

A good URL is short, readable and stable: clinic.com/dental-implant, not clinic.com/index.php?id=127&cat=3. But the most important rule is a different one: a URL, once published, is never lost.

When you change platform, structure or domain:

Export the list of all existing URLs (from the sitemap, Search Console and GA4).
Map every old URL to its new equivalent.
Set up 301 (permanent) redirects, one-to-one — not everything to the homepage.
Update internal links so they point directly to the new URLs.
Submit the new sitemap and watch the indexing report and 404 errors for 4–8 weeks.

The small things that are not small

The whole site on HTTPS, with a redirect from HTTP.
One version only: with www or without, not both.
Unique <title> and meta description on every page.
A real 404 page (status 404, not status 200 with the text "not found").
No duplicate pages generated by filters and parameters — or a canonical to the main version.