A week or so ago, I reported that there was an issue with Google Search labeling real content pages as soft 404s, and thus not ranking those pages in Google Search. This bug directly seemed to have caused traffic issues for these sites. Well, that bug seems now to be mostly, if not fully, resolved.
I did ask Google for an official statement but Google would not comment outside of what has been said publicly by John Mueller of Google that I covered in my original story.
What seems to have happened was that some bug led Google to label pages that were ranking well and had real content on them as 404 (page not found) pages. This resulted in Google dropping those pages out of the index and those pages stopped getting traffic from Google Search.
Things started to improve a few days ago:
Obviously recovery has begun. +20% SI @sistrix 🙏🤟we disabled an a/b testing yesterday. We will test it later if this is still the reason or it is only the google bug
— Oᒪᗩᖴ KOᑭᑭ ✌️ 👍 (@Olaf_Kopp) April 17, 2021
And as of yesterday, it seems things returned to normal:
Thousands of pages on our site were simply dropped out of Google’s index “poof”, since they incorrectly labeled them as soft 404s
— Jordan Silton (@jsilton) April 20, 2021
This can happen to any page at any time, while our homepage was not impacted, other pages that were in our top most trafficked just disappeared
My take as updated last week https://t.co/g3pqIHYajl - Google did some changes in language identification of text like "not found" and "no result" that triggered 'soft 404' in cases that normally wouldn't trigger.
— Shlomo Sasson (@onlinex) April 20, 2021
A few days later we saw that Google fixed it also on their side so such cases don't happen anymore
— Shlomo Sasson (@onlinex) April 20, 2021
A blogpost us in the making. We are fully recovered now
— Oᒪᗩᖴ KOᑭᑭ ✌️ 👍 (@Olaf_Kopp) April 20, 2021
Again, Google would not give me an official statement but this is what John Mueller of Google said earlier on:
I think you also posted on Twitter. There are some other other people who had similar problems.With the other people I was able to pick up the URLs and send them to the team and I think they're looking into what what is happening there. But if you want maybe you can just drop your domain in the chat here and then I can pass it out. Okay well if you want to send it to me in in some other way let me know, I am happy to pass it on.
I think the team has found some things that they're looking into. But having more examples is always really useful.
As far as I could tell from from the information I have so far is it's essentially a small change we made in the soft 404 detection and how that's picking things up in weird ways.
John did add that the reason Google won't go into detail is that it did not affect many:
When things affect so few pages / sites like here, we tend not to go into too much detail.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 20, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
