Reply To: Weird ranking drops on WordPress sites

[Mason]

Honestly, in my opinion, Yeah, I’d still be suspicious of the WP side before I start screaming “Google update.” That “looks fine in Search Console but some long-tails just quietly die” thing has bitten me before and it was **not** some big obvious crash. Ended up being a plugin doing slightly different output on cached vs uncached hits. No errors, no drama, just enough garbage for Google to start acting weird. If it’s the same theme + same cache setup on two sites, I’d be looking at anything shared between them first: – plugin that touches titles/meta/schema – lazyload / optimization junk – cache exclusions not actually working – different HTML from mobile/desktop – weird redirects or canonicals on some pages I’d compare raw HTML on a dropped page vs a healthy one, both cached and uncached. Headers too. Half the time the “same page” isn’t actually the same page to Google. And yeah, the bounce-back-for-two-days thing is exactly the kind of annoying crap that makes me think some response/state issue, not a clean algo hit. Google’s been doing that dumb tease-and-drop thing a lot lately, but I still wouldn’t trust it until I’ve checked the site output properly.