When accidentally placed noindex on all internal pages, it lost half of its traffic and considerable revenue. One way to catch this is to reference the source code, but it's still cumbersome to execute. Change detection is a better option because you can not only browse through the code, but also see what has changed and if it is what you expected. Change Detection So if you have a noindex tag on your staging site and an index in production, you know you have to do something. To do this, you can use the Chrome diff tool, which is a free extension of SEORadar.
Just load the URL you want to compare into the tab and launch the extension. ChromeDiffMenu Then you can see a detailed comparison of the two pages. Detailed comparison This is another example of a sudden and devastating SEO problem. This website lost all of its unbranded traffic and gained 95% of its SEO overnight. Traffic lost What they were having was a rendering issue that resulted in Googlebot rendering only a blank page. This Real Estate Photo Editing problem would have only been discovered by testing as a Googlebot. Fetch as Googlebot The only way to know for sure what Google is looking at is to fetch it with Google's user agent. In other cases it is a bit more subtle. Changes in Trulia's navigation structure have resulted in the following steady declines: Trulia This issue was caused by removing navigation links.
However, what made the situation more difficult to diagnose was that there was no changelog available. The most important changes to review Want to protect your organic traffic and revenue? Then, be sure to monitor for the following changes: critical title Canonicals Noindex Nofollow Navigation and footer links (removed) Robots. txt redirect Almost critical Hreflang Keyword usage Content areas (reviews, SEO content, etc. Meta description Really important Word Count Page Size H2 / H3 AMP GA / GTM Pro Tips Create a page to test with all the elements that are important to you.