Technical SEO
The noindex that quietly deindexes a production site
· Configuration notes, not a newsroom.
Staging plugins, 'discourage search engines', and leftover robots meta on templates. SiteRune treats homepage noindex as critical and inner noindex on wordy URLs as high.
Two different files, same outcome
meta robots noindex on the homepage is seo-noindex (critical). robots.txt Disallow: / is seo-robots-block (also critical). WordPress 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' writes the first. A leftover staging plugin writes either. Teams ship it to production once a year and spend a quarter asking why traffic died.
Inner pages lie
SiteRune walks nav and sitemap. crawl-noindex-inner fires when a linked URL with real copy is noindex. That belongs on thank-you pages, search, and faceted junk — not /pricing sitting in the header. Fix the template, not the homepage hero.
How to check without us
View source on production (not staging). Search for noindex. curl the URL and read X-Robots-Tag. Open /robots.txt and make sure Disallow: / is not the whole policy. Then run SiteRune so the finding is in the brief your engineer actually ships from.
Run it on a live URL
The brief will name your CMS and attach the files. Three guest scans, no card.