Found a rogue noindex tag. Recovered 4,200 clicks/mo overnight.

Found a rogue noindex tag. Recovered 4,200 clicks/mo overnight.

Client's whole blog category 'mysteriously' lost half its traffic 3 months prior. They blamed an algo update. Wasn't.

I ran a crawl audit:
— A template change had injected noindex on every post under one category
— 60+ pages quietly fell out of the index
— Nobody noticed because the homepage was fine

Removed the tag, resubmitted the sitemap, requested indexing on the top 10.

Within 9 days: 4,200 clicks/mo back. Zero content work.

Before you blame Google, crawl your own site. Half of 'algo drops' are self-inflicted.