🔍 Overview
Some Website Studio websites experienced technical SEO bugs that affected sitemap accuracy, noindex tag behaviour, page indexability, and overall SEO scores. The issues described in this article have been resolved and deployed to production. This article explains what happened, what was fixed, and what you should do now to verify your site is healthy.
🐛 What Bugs Were Present?
The following confirmed bugs affected Website Studio sites:
- Homepage missing from sitemap: The XML sitemap omitted the homepage URL, reducing crawl coverage.
- Incorrect noindex tags on published pages: Valid, publishable pages were incorrectly marked as noindex, preventing Google from indexing them and causing ranking drops.
- Title tags rewritten on the SERP: A related bug caused title tags to be overridden in search results, further contributing to ranking loss.
- Preview and draft domains were indexable: Unpublished draft and preview versions of sites were publicly crawlable and could appear in Google search results, competing directly with your live site.
- Low SEO scores on Desktop and Mobile: Generated websites were receiving unexpectedly low SEO scores due to a scoring calculation error.
- URL pollution from editor and preview URLs: Legacy editor, preview, and duplicate URLs were leaking into the live site and its sitemap, inflating URL counts and confusing crawlers.
✅ What Has Been Fixed?
All of the issues listed above have been resolved and are fully deployed to production. Here is a summary of what was corrected:
- The sitemap generator now correctly includes the homepage and excludes all noindex, draft, and preview URLs.
- Noindex tags are no longer applied incorrectly to published, indexable pages.
- Title tags are preserved as set in Website Studio and are no longer overridden.
- Preview and draft domains are now blocked from indexing.
- SEO scores for generated websites now reflect accurate Desktop and Mobile evaluations.
- Editor, preview, and duplicate URLs are no longer injected into the live site or its sitemap.
📋 Steps to Verify Your Site After the Fix
Even though the bugs are resolved, we recommend taking the following steps to confirm your site is in good shape and to help Google re-crawl any affected pages promptly.
- Open Website Studio: Navigate to Website Studio from your platform dashboard.
- Check your published site settings: Review your pages to confirm no pages are still marked noindex unintentionally.
- Inspect your sitemap: Visit your sitemap URL and confirm the homepage and all key published pages are present, and that no preview or draft URLs appear.
- Check Google Search Console: If you have Google Search Console connected, review your Coverage and Sitemaps reports for any lingering indexing errors or excluded pages.
- Request re-indexing if needed: For any pages that were previously excluded incorrectly, use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to request re-indexing.
If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.