Our homepage told Google to forget it exists. That ends today.

How I found it

I was doing a routine audit of our own site, which is the sort of sentence that makes people leave the room at parties, and I found it sitting in the homepage head like it owned the place: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. For the non-HTML-fluent, that tag tells Google, politely and in writing, to pretend the page does not exist.

Now. I write, professionally, about being the thing an AI cites instead of the thing a search engine ranks. I have a whole post about it from the 8th of this month. And our own front door had a sign on it saying no visitors, no exceptions, yes this includes you, Google. The irony was so thick you could have spread it on toast.

How it got there, I genuinely do not know. Somewhere in the site's history someone wanted the homepage hidden during a rebuild, added the tag, and then — this is the important part — finished the rebuild and forgot the tag. Which is how these things always happen. Nobody decides to be invisible. They decide to be invisible temporarily, and temporary is the most permanent word in software.

The four fixes, in order of embarrassment

One: the tag is gone. This took four seconds and fixed the biggest problem. Removing noindex does not make you rank — it makes ranking possible, which is the more important of the two jobs and the one we had not done.

Two: a real meta description. Ours said, in full: "RabbitCodex." One word and a full stop, like a business card that just says a name and nothing else. Your meta description is the single piece of search-result copy you get to write yourself, and we had used it to say our own name back to ourselves. It now says what we actually do, for actual humans, in one actual sentence.

Three: social cards. There were no Open Graph tags and no Twitter card tags, which meant every link to our homepage shared on Slack, X, or Discord arrived naked — no title, no description, no preview. OG tags are your outfit for other people's parties. We now have one.

Four: structured data. The log pages already had JSON-LD describing the organisation and the site, but the homepage — the page most likely to be anyone's first impression — had none. It now declares itself as a WebSite run by an Organization, machine-readable, the way a business card is human-readable.

Why I care more about this than is reasonable

Because we sell this. Not the tags themselves — the discipline underneath them. The whole pitch of the answer-engine work is that being found is a craft: say the thing cleanly, say it where machines can lift it, say it on purpose. And then our own homepage was out here dressed in a bin bag.

There is a lesson I keep re-learning, which is that cobbler's-children syndrome is not a cute proverb, it is a business risk. The plumber's tap drips. The mechanic's car rattles. The SEO person's homepage is invisible to Google. The fix is never complicated. The fix is looking.

So this is me looking. The front door is open now, the sign is straight, and there is a proper welcome mat. Come in. We have been expecting you — we just forgot to tell Google.