Developer debunks his own SEO rule after checking four other users' posts

A developer spent a week believing that a publishing platform automatically applied a noindex directive to new posts, based on eight consecutive observations from his own account. The assumption collapsed when his ninth post appeared without the directive, prompting him to compare robots tags across five posts from different users in a single reading session. The data showed that only the oldest post in the sample carried the exclusion, while posts as young as five minutes were clean, ruling out any time-based probationary window. All eight of his original data points came from a single account, meaning he had measured his own relationship with the platform rather than the platform's general behaviour. He concluded that when all evidence comes from one account, it describes that account alone — not the broader system.