I launched my micro SaaS a few months ago. Clean landing page. A few blog posts. A public roadmap.
I wasn’t expecting magic traffic, but I thought: "If I get the basics right, organic will slowly kick in."
Spoiler: it didn’t.
Two months after launch, my site was still completely invisible in Google.
Not ranking. Not even indexed.
The culprit? A forgotten noindex tag.
During development, I had set all my pages to noindex to avoid early crawling.
Totally normal.
But in the rush to launch, I forgot to remove it.
Result: Google wasn’t even allowed to see my content.
No matter how good my landing page was.
No matter how many people shared it.
From Google's perspective, it didn’t exist.
Why this hurt more than I expected
I was counting on slow but steady organic growth.
I wanted early validation from long-tail traffic.
But because of this one line of code, I lost:
- Early momentum
- Feedback from cold visitors
- Time I’ll never get back
The real lesson
SEO isn’t just keywords and backlinks.
It starts with not messing up the fundamentals.
Here are a few things I now double-check before any launch:
- ✅
noindexis off on live pages - ✅ Sitemap is submitted and clean
- ✅ Canonical tags are correct (or not overused)
- ✅ Titles & meta descriptions are unique
- ✅ No pages are blocked in
robots.txtby accident
These aren’t "growth hacks" — they’re just the basic hygiene most indie hackers skip when rushing a launch.
What about you?
Have you ever made a simple SEO (or technical) mistake that cost you time, growth, or visibility?
Let’s share a checklist for future makers launching fast but smart.
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