Does reading that title give you a mini-panic attack?
Having gone through exactly as the title suggests, I can guarantee your anxiety is fully warranted.
If you care to relive my nightmare with me — perhaps as equal parts catharsis and SEO study — we will walk through the events chronologically.
Are you ready?
August 4th, 2019
It was a Sunday morning. I was drinking my coffee and screwing around in our SEO tools, like normal, not expecting a damned thing. Then … BAM!
What. The. Hell?
As SEOs, we’re all used to seeing natural fluctuations in rankings. Fluctuations, not disappearances.
Step 1: Denial
Immediately my mind goes to one place: it’s a mistake. So I jumped into some other tools to confirm whether or not Ahrefs was losing its mind.
Google Analytics also showed a corresponding drop in traffic, confirming something was definitely up. So as an SEO, I naturally assumed the worst…
Step 2: Algo panic
Algorithm update. Please, please don’t let it be an algo update.
I jumped into Barracuda’s Panguin Tool to see if our issue coincided with a confirmed update.
No updates. Phew.
Step 3: Diagnosis
Nobody ever thinks clearly when their reptile brain is engaged. You panic, you think irrationally and you make poor decisions. Zero chill.
I finally gathered some presence of mind to think clearly about what happened: It’s highly unusual for keywords rankings to disappear completely. It must be technical.
It must be indexing.
A quick Google search for the pages that lost keyword rankings confirmed that the pages had, in fact, disappeared. Search Console reported the same:
Notice the warning at the bottom:
No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag
Now we were