Has Anyone Seen Much Change in SERPS ? from Sept 10th to 17th

[wrockca]

I was notified by a client that he saw a noticeable drop in Ranking for High traffic Keywords within his Niche but as I looked deeper I found that almost everyone who was in the Top 10 have fell to ZERO, so I did some more looking around and found that large brands from the past Panda 4 Update, and they seem to also be hit.. I am currently verifying my data but, however I have seen large sites lose 1K or more Keywords over a few days traffic but don't show signs of improving... they started to bounce back for a few within the 15th but I am seeing trends of others being effected up to the 17th 18th mark...

I would love to hear what others have experienced or am I just CRAZY? Thx

[johnhh]

I don't track our SERPS on a regular basis, but we had major traffic drops ( comparing the day with the same day the previous week e.g. Monday with the previous Monday ) during Sept 10 to Sept 16th.

Drops were up to -25%, with an odd day at +2%.

Since then we have has a recovery, starting 17th Sept.

Something was going on although I couldn't put my finger on it when I looked at the SERPS.

[EditorialGuy]

No change here.

[marek01]

If your client is using W3 Total Cache get rid of it immediately. After September update that plugin blocks googlebot from crawling your website. The issue could affect entire website of few pages. I was loosing ranking left and right from sept.15th Couldn't pinpoint the problem until I got message in WM tool regarding soft 404 errors. Now everything seems to be fine. The question is am I going to get my old rankings back once my site is re-crawled...

[netmeg]

I have over 50 sites under my purview that are using that Cache plugin and they are not blocked by googlebot.

[marek01]

Maybe it doesn't affect everyone. I know for sure that in my case W3 Total Cache was blocking googlebot. When I was fetching the pages in question with Total Cache on I couldn't see googlebot in live traffic view. When I deactivated it googlebot was showing up without any problem. Besides on their support thread there was someone who have had similar problem. I couldn't pinpoint the issue until I got message in wm tools

Dear owner or webmaster of xxxxxx
While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors......

On my end the pages were perfectly viewable, except google could see them.

[samwest]

@marek01 - stupid question but did you check your robots.txt?

[marek01]

Yes I did. No issues there. If there was an issue with robots.txt I would have gotten URL Errors under 'crawl errors' in WM tools. There was nothing in there. In fact is says ' No errors detected in the last 90 days. Nice!' The pages in question were not modified since late august of this year, no new plugin were add as well, except for updates and one of them was W3 Total Cache.

From what I have learnt by googling aroung 'soft 404 error' means that googlebot knows that there is a page it just couldn't access the content. I checked every page and on my end and everything looked good except googlebot couldn't see it. It's like serving googlebot a blank page which was once full of content. Do that and your ranking will plummet in no time just like mine did.

Also I don't think the loss of ranking is penalty related, because those pages are still indexed. Moreover, google is still ranking less relevant pages for the keywords the pages in question used to rank very well.

After I have ditched the plugin I am monitoring my site on regular basis and I'm happy to see that google is crawling the pages in question. Hope that the ranking will be restored soon. I'll wait a few days and see what happens. I just hope I won't have to start from scratch, keep my fingers crossed.

[wrockca]

THX Everyone for your comments... It sounds about right, as I have seen the comp that dropped come back but not fully most of the first page results are still gone for many of them.. I am not complaining but still cannot put my finger on it either.

THx

[LuckyLiz]

An article in SearchEngineWatch today mentions a Panda update on Sept. 5.
Link: (if allowed)
[searchenginewatch.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:59 pm (utc) on Sep 25, 2014]
[edit reason] removed smiley [/edit]