Q: After launch our traffic vanished overnight. Could it be the staging site?

Q: After launch our traffic vanished overnight. Could it be the staging site?

Short answer: very possibly — check if 'noindex' or a robots.txt block shipped from staging to production.

Long answer: This is one of the most brutal, common migration disasters. Staging environments are deliberately blocked from Google — usually with a site-wide 'noindex' meta tag, an X-Robots-Tag header, or a robots.txt 'Disallow: /'. When the new site goes live, that block sometimes gets copied straight to production. Google obediently de-indexes your entire site within days.

A sudden total wipeout (not a gradual dip) is the fingerprint.

Check immediately:

— View source on your homepage: any 'noindex' in a robots meta tag?
— Open yoursite.com/robots.txt — does it say 'Disallow: /'?
— Check response headers for X-Robots-Tag: noindex.

Next step: if you find any of these, remove them, then request indexing for key pages in Search Console. Recovery is usually fast once the block is gone — but every hour counts, so check this FIRST.