My 8-Month Blackout: The Cost of a Rogue Noindex Tag
It is the error every SEO dreads, yet it happens to the best of us. I forgot to remove the robots meta tag with noindex from my staging environment before pushing to production. Oops.
For three months, my site was a ghost town. I blamed the latest Core Update. I blamed the rise of AI Overviews. I even blamed my content quality. But the culprit was a single line of HTML in my <head>: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />.