One meta tag, noindex!
We launched Twofold 3.0 some weeks back and were having trouble getting indexed on Google. Now, I always tell people I built Twofold on SEO alone and not being to index my own product was extremely hard to accept.
We took all the steps needed to get indexed. We were creating new content and even getting some write ups. But when we did the site:twofold.asia search on google, there was no data.
As the weeks ticked by I was getting frustrated. I was supposed to be good at this but had no solution. Eventually after banging my head against the wall, I went back to SEO forums. There I found another person having a similar problem. She told me to look at my code and see if there was anything blocking an index.
We scoured through our code and could not find the error. I was close to tears. Finally in a post from 2010 someone mentioned that a <noindex><nofollow> tag had been inserted in her meta. Now it was a revelation, in fact i closed the tab but there was a nagging feeling that i could not shake off.
I look through the code again and there it was, staring at me in the face. On every page. Our team at RRE fixed for us and made a note to check all their pages as well.
So the question is how does that tag work -
It is basically a command that tells search engine crawlers that your site does not want to be indexed.
Why is the tag used. I can think of 3 reasons :
1. It is inserted during development or staging periods where your developers want to see how pages look like vis-a-vis designs and do not want search results to pick them up. 2. It is inserted by a unhappy developer because you fired him and he wants to get back at you, with very few lines of code. 3. Finally a happy developer want to impress or charge you more for fixing an SEO issue to boost your indexing.
In either case, it is not very ethical (in my opinion) to do such a thing.
Now Twofold is back on google and we can go back to work on growth. If you need any such help SEO and good development, check out the folks at RRE (full disclosure, I own part of the company)