I recently worked on an interesting SEO case where a huge e-commerce site experienced a significant traffic drop, primarily affecting their blog, writes Olga Zarr.
The client came to me suggesting that Google has an issue and is either incorrectly thinking there is a no-index tag on the site (while clearly there isn’t) or is somehow penalizing the site.
At a first glance, it looked weird.
Indeed, there was no no-index tag in the code.
However, one of the first things I always do when diagnosing such mysterious cases is to check the URLs in the Google Search Console URL Inspect.
The URL Inspection tool showed that indexing is allowed and the client swore they hadn’t added any no-index tags in any way.
However, the LIVE test and rendered HTML showed that there was indeed a “noindex” tag there.
A full website crawl with JavaScript rendering allowed me to get the full answer and the entire picture of what happened there.
Guess what was it?
There was a JavaScript redirect to an old AMP version of the page.
This AMP version was not only empty but also had a no-index tag.
This redirect correctly “transferred” no-index tags to blog pages which Google CORRECTLY removed from the index.
As soon as this was fixed, Google started indexing the site and it recovered its traffic in less than 48 hours.
So what’s the lesson here?
❌ Don’t take the client’s word as gospel.
Always investigate thoroughly.
✅ When using the URL Inspection tool, run the LIVE test to see what’s happening in real time.
✅ Check both the source code and the rendered HTML for any discrepancies.
❗️ Remember that what you see in your browser or SEO plugins reflects the source code, but the rendered code might tell a different story.
✅ To catch similar issues, crawl the site with JavaScript rendering enabled.
❗️But be careful not to overload the site’s server when crawling with JavaScript rendering.
🔥 Before assuming that Google is doing something wrong, double-check what you are communicating to Google.
In this case, the message to Google was clear:
Don’t index the blog.
