indyank - 1:53 pm on Mar 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

@reblaus, I am exactly seeing the same thing as you do to one of the sites and nothing has helped so far.

I noticed a fresh cache for the home page of this site after nearly 10 days.The last cache date was 3rd march and this new cache is dated march 12.

Here is another interesting fact for users of wordpress.

Wordpress released a new version on Feb 23 and simple tags plugin caused a mess with category and tag pages.I wouldn't fault the plugin developer, as everything was working fine until this new version.Unfortunately this new wordpress release broke that plugin, which in turn broke the site's navigation.All category and tag pages displayed the content of home page. We were using "noindex,follow" on these pages.

we noticed this only around march 3 and fixed it.The developer made a quick release of the updated plugin by then.But I am not sure whether the home page was crawled before or after we fixed it on march 3.The re-crawl happened only on march 12.

This explained the problem that I reported earlier.I was seeing 404 errors for urls like

domain.com/category/wdget/page/4, etc.

in GWT but those pages never existed for those category pages.Since category pages were redirected to home, somehow googlebot crawled sub pages of home as sub pages of categories and reported those errors.

I have a feeling that these not only created some 404 errors but might also have triggered duplicate penalty.

This entire mess happened as we updated wordpress to the new version as soon as they released it.It was bad luck for us.

Now we do not know whether the panda update or the duplicate penalty induced by this wordpress/plugin has caused these issues.