Why your site is not in Google: 9 causes, in the order worth checking

Before anything else, work out what is actually happening, because the treatment is completely different.

Case A — you are not indexed. Google does not have the page in its database. Test it: search Google for site:yourdomain.md. If nothing comes back, or far fewer results than you have pages, you have an indexing problem. That is technical, and it is fixable.

Case B — you are indexed, but at position 40. Pages show up under site:, but nobody finds you with a normal search. That is not a technical problem, it is competition and authority, and it is solved differently — more slowly and with more work.

Most companies that write to us believe they have Case A and actually have Case B. Check before you buy anything.

1. The page is blocked in robots.txt. Open yourdomain.md/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, the whole site is blocked. This happens often after launch, because the staging site was blocked and nobody removed it.

2. The page carries a noindex tag. WordPress has a “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox under Settings → Reading. If it is ticked you can write content for a year and never appear. Check the page source for <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

3. Redirects and duplicate versions. If your site answers on www and without, on http and https, with no proper redirects, Google sees four sites copying each other and does not know which to show. All of them should redirect permanently (301 or 308) to one version.

4. No sitemap, or one you never submitted. It is not mandatory, but for a new site it is the fastest way to tell Google what you have. Create a Google Search Console account, verify the property and submit the sitemap. It is free and takes 15 minutes.

5. The text is rendered by JavaScript and is not in the HTML. Many modern sites only show content after scripts load. Google usually manages, but not always and not quickly. Test with Ctrl+U (view source) and look for a paragraph of your text. If it is not there, that is a real risk.

6. The page has too little of its own text. A service page with 80 words and three photos gives Google nothing to rank. It is not about a magic word count, it is about actually answering the question someone arrived with: price, process, timeline, what is included and what is not.

7. You have ten pages saying the same thing. The classic mistake: “web design Chisinau”, “web design Balti”, “web design Moldova”, all with identical text and the city swapped. Google picks one, or none. One good page beats ten copies.

8. The domain is too new. A domain under a year old is competing with sites that have been accumulating signals for ten. There is no shortcut here, but there is a strategy: do not attack “web development Moldova” head on — attack specific questions where competition is thinner. “What does an online store with 1C integration cost” has ten times less volume, but you can reach the first page in months rather than years.

9. Nobody links to you. After every Google update, links remain a strong signal. This is not about buying links — that gets penalised. It is about being mentioned where it is natural to be: the chamber of commerce directory, review platforms in your field, the websites of clients you have worked for, an article you write for a local publication.

This is where most sites in Moldova stop: the technical layer can be closed in weeks, but authority is built over months. If someone promises you the top spot in 30 days on a competitive keyword, they are selling something they cannot deliver.

Step 1. Search Google for site:yourdomain.md. Compare the result count with how many pages you have. A large gap means an indexing problem.

Step 2. Open yourdomain.md/robots.txt and look for Disallow: /.

Step 3. Open an important page, press Ctrl+U, and search for “noindex” and for a paragraph of your visible text.

Step 4. Go to Google Search Console → Pages. It states exactly how many pages are indexed and, for those that are not, why.

Step 5. Type the http://, https://www. and non-www versions into the address bar and see whether they all land in the same place.

If everything checks out after those five steps and you still have no traffic, you have Case B: technically fine, but content and authority below your competitors. That is where the long work begins — and where a real SEO audit starts, telling you which keywords you have a genuine chance at over the next few months.