Reply To: Weird ranking drops this week?

From my experience, yeah, I’d still be looking at the plugin update first, but I wouldn’t act like Google’s innocent either. A couple affiliate sites getting hit right after a Monday change is usually “something broke” or “Google shuffled stuff,” and half the time it’s both. Check the obvious crap first — canonicals, noindex, internal links, sitemap output — because GSC loves making a small issue look like a murder scene. If you want, post the plugin name and what kind of drop it was. Search or indexing? Different mess.