Lab · 02
Deindexed. A site has vanished from Google.
Blackwater Coffee Roasters ranked for everything. Then it ranked for nothing. The previous SEO left in a hurry and left notes in the places only a crawler would read.
Three levels. Every clue is a real technical defect, built into real HTTP, so curl and devtools work exactly as they would on a client site. If you would rather stay in the window, the Inspector docked along the bottom of every level page shows you what the browser hides: status, headers, redirect hops, the source as served, and lets you fetch any page as Googlebot. Every step has two hints.
Level 1
The taster
View-source, robots.txt and a sitemap. Nothing else needed.
about ten minutes
Start →Level 2
HTTP
Headers, redirects, canonicals, rendering and cloaking. The Inspector or devtools.
about half an hour
Start →Level 3
The deep end
A log file, a locked vault, a cookie, a phone and a parameter.
an hour, maybe more
Start →
Finish
Enter all three keys and this box turns into your completion code. Progress is saved in this browser only.
Scoreboard
Finishers, in order. The same list lives in robots.txt, which is where scoreboards belong.
- Nobody yet. Be the first.
Rules of the house: everything you need is on this site. No brute force, no scanning tools; the clues are in plain sight to anyone who knows where crawlers look. With a nod to SEO Pirates, 2019.