Reply To: Weird traffic drop after plugin update?

[axelrowan]

Yeah, plugin updates are still the first thing I’d suspect. I’ve seen this exact “not dead, just weird” pattern from a cache/plugin combo where the rendered HTML changed just enough to shuffle things around. Not always a full-on disaster, just enough to make Google start acting like it’s half-blind for a day or two. If it was me, I’d rollback the last update and check server logs / rendered source on a couple of the dropped pages. If the HTML changed, there’s your answer. If not, then in most cases hosting or some crawl/render issue, but I wouldn’t jump straight to “Google being Google” yet. That’s usually the lazy excuse people reach for when something in the stack actually changed.