Q: We launched and a week later traffic fell off a cliff. Nothing else changed. Help?
A: Breathe — this has a classic culprit. Short answer: check whether your live site shipped with the staging robots.txt that blocks all crawling, or a leftover site-wide noindex.
Long answer: Staging environments are usually walled off with Disallow: / or a noindex meta tag so they don't get indexed early. When the new build goes live, that block sometimes rides along. Google obeys it, drops your pages, and traffic collapses days later as the index updates. It's one of the most common post-launch disasters precisely because everything "looks fine" in the browser.
The fix:
— Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm it isn't Disallow: /
— Search your templates for stray noindex tags
— Submit a fresh sitemap and request indexing on key pages
Next step: check robots.txt and view-source one important page for noindex immediately.
Migration Helpdesk
@MigrationHelpdesk
Q: We launched and a week later traffic fell off a cliff. Nothing else changed. Help?
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