🔥 How to Lose Position #1 on Google in 4 Easy Steps

Short tutorial: How to Lose Position #1 on Google in 4 Easy Steps

Disclaimer - It was positioned #1 for the following keywords “hosted status page”.

TL;DR:

1. Open your Caddyfile (the equivalent of httpd.conf but for Caddy web server)
2. Set “X-Robots-Tag” header value to “none”
3. Save Caddyfile and restart Caddy
4. Don’t mind checking the crawling status for a while

So, there I was, fine-tuning Caddyfile for Hosted Status Page.

I was right at tuning those pesky headers. It came down to checking if X-Robots-Tag was configured properly, and I decided to change it fix it!

By setting it to none.

It was back on December 29th 2020.

For some reason, I thought that if I set it to none (none as in no restrictions) it will let in all those web crawlers and continue indexing it as they did up until then.

⚠️ Obviously, none is equivalent to noindex.

That's the price you pay when you act smart 👨‍🔧.

Well, it's been like that for the entire month now. I figured out accidentally by going to the Google Search Console to check if there are any issues or something worth fixing.

Well, there was 🤣🤣🤣

So, if your Product ends up as mine did, simply fix your headers (or check for any <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tags throughout your pages) and request reindexing from the Search Console mentioned above.

Anyway, RTFM guys, and don't fix stuff that works!

Sorry for the long post.

Wish you all a happy Monday!

Cheers!