Took me 8 hours to figure out why my client's traffic tanked after a site update

Turned out their new dev accidentally removed all the meta descriptions and H1 tags during the migration. Has anyone else had a client's dev team mess something simple up that cost you a full day of digging?

3 comments

3 Comments

ray61318d ago

Check their robots.txt next time too. That one gets me.

xenam8418d ago

Gently disagree on the H1 part though - losing meta descriptions can definitely tank traffic, but H1 tags aren't really a direct ranking signal anymore (not since like 2019 or so). Still a pain to spend 8 hours tracking down though, I feel your pain on that one.

wade_anderson18d ago

Fair point. Google's been downplaying H1s for a while now, they care way more about content structure overall. Still a brutal bug to hunt down though, hours wasted for something that might not even matter.