Deployment, also called a release, is the step in which a new version of a website goes from the development process to the live environment. Here it is meant in the SEO sense, as the moment code, template or configuration changes can alter what search engines see.
Why does a deployment matter for SEO?
A release can change titles, canonical tags, robots meta tags, status codes, redirects, internal links or the robots.txt, even when that was not the aim of the change. A typical case is a setting from staging that reaches production by mistake, such as a rule that blocks all crawlers.
Google says robots.txt is used mainly to avoid overloading a site with requests and is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google. For that, it names noindex and password protection. A faulty noindex therefore acts differently from a faulty Disallow. Google also points out that a misplaced noindex depends on Google crawling the page again, so traffic falls more slowly.
If a release changes URLs, Google’s site-move guidance recommends server-side permanent redirects, keeping them for generally at least one year, and changing only one thing at a time.
Example
A staging robots.txt is copied to production:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Googlebot may no longer fetch any page of the live domain.
Checks after a release (assessment)
- robots.txt and meta robots or X-Robots-Tag values
- canonicals and status codes of key pages
- redirects and XML sitemap
- titles, headings and internal links
Sources
- Site moves and migrations – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Introduction to robots.txt – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Debugging drops in Google Search traffic – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
Last updated: