Spotting a Major SEO Technical Issue Early

tmblast

I check the Google Search Console for all my clients every few days. 99% of the time, nothing comes out of it via an emergency. However, that 1% of the time did happen for one of my #NationalSEO clients, which caused me to investigate the problem. I noticed that the Google SEO traffic began dropping for the first time in months, just a week before the holidays, which was strange. Google Search Console is 2-3 days behind the current day, so I then went into Google Analytics and confirmed the traffic drop. From there, I reviewed the error report in GSC and noticed a spike in soft 404s, which was odd. I then ran the entire site through Screaming Frog/Sitebulb and noticed that soft 404s were being reported.  Long story short, there was an issue with a significant 301 redirect in the HTACCESS file. The rewrite rule was treating the 301 redirect as a soft 404, which meant Google (and Bing) were removing the pages from their indexes, causing the traffic drop.  In short, potential (and even current) clients often ask me about the value of having me on a monthly basis. Even when things are good, as you can see in the chart above, where traffic is growing, you have to keep an eye on the account. SEO traffic for them accounts for around 40% of their sales and traffic, so a disruption to that expected traffic will be noticeable.   Quickly seeing that there was a problem, running checks, and implementing a fix in a few days reversed that traffic drop.  Timestamps 0:00 I Check My Clients Weekly 0:32 What is a Soft 404? 1:08 The Obvious Traffic Decline Check 1:25 Tested that Page in GSC 1:53 GSC Showed Me a List of Soft 404 Pages 2:16 Bing Saw the Same Soft 404 Problem 2:44 The SEO Steps I Took to Fix the Problem 4:13 Traffic is Now Rebounding 4:38 In Summary  https://tmblast.com/

Transcript

00:00Hey everyone, what's going on? Greg here again from Team Blast. So for all of my clients I have,

00:03both local and national, I check on their health and their website traffic at least twice a week.

00:09And for one of my clients, their big national brand, I caught an early problem that the technical

00:14crawls did not catch. Within Google Search Console, I noticed a traffic drop. Today is November 25th

00:19and you would expect with Thanksgiving coming up, maybe traffic might drop. But for them,

00:24this happened a week early. So I knew something was wrong and I want to walk you through how I

00:27went about this issue. And then of course, the rebound that we are seeing, which is most

00:31important. So to start, what they had was a soft 404. Basically the best way to think about a soft

00:37404, if you're not sure what that means, is that it's almost like if you go to a library and you

00:41ask the librarian if there's this book and they go, yes, it's available. And then they give you a book

00:45and as you open it, there's no words on the page. You're kind of like, I don't know what I'm looking

00:50at. And the librarian's like, oh no, like that's the book. Like you know now there's no real content

00:54there. That's how Google and also Bing describe what a soft 404. So it kind of looks like the

01:00thing you're looking for, but it doesn't really contain the elements of the HTML content.

01:04Therefore it gets removed from the index because they saw 404. Now for my client, what I did was

01:10I went to Google Search Console. Again, I saw that initial traffic drop and I said,

01:13I'm just curious what, you know, what is happening with this page? Maybe we lost ranking. So I went to

01:18one of our top performing pages and I saw that complete drop off and I said, okay, that's really weird.

01:22So then the next thing I did was I went to Google Search Console and I went to the live test within

01:29the page and came back with URLs unavailable to Google. It's a soft 404. What Google has,

01:36which I really like is that they allow you to see what Google sees via the HTML crawl.

01:40So I looked at it and said, okay, that's weird. Again, that library example, it's like the content

01:45that's there does not match what's on the page. It looks like a 404. So like, okay, obviously Google

01:51is not going to index this. What I did next is I went to the index report within Search Console.

01:55I said, okay, this is just a one-off page. What about the rest? I noticed the same trend

01:58starting on really, it's actually November 16th, but so much happened November 15th. All these pages

02:05soft 404, soft 404, soft 404. It made me realize that, okay, there's something that's definitely going

02:11on. These pages are being removed now by Google, which is going to impact our traffic, which is a

02:16problem. The next step I did was, okay, this is a Google issue. I know for them, you know,

02:21Bing for them is less than 10% of their overall traffic. I think it's something like 6% or 7%.

02:26So it's not the biggest thing, but I thought, okay, well, if Google's having a problem, let me go

02:29into Bing. I did the same test, same URL, came back, URL cannot be indexed by Bing. Okay, got it.

02:35Then I did another test too. Same thing, same error. I also went into the crawl and index report,

02:40same issue, 404s via the soft 404 message. Okay. So I identified the problem and said, okay,

02:47Google is removing pages. This is going to reduce the traffic potential for my client. This is a

02:51major thing we have to fix, especially before the holidays. So the steps I did to fix it. So

02:56obviously, as I mentioned, I have technical crawls on a weekly basis for all of my clients,

03:00but I also manually check in either their analytics for, or their Google search console,

03:04just to make sure there's no obvious drops. And that was actually the case. It caught my eye.

03:08Next, I ran the site through Screaming Frog. It's a third-party tool and also SiteBulb. It's another

03:14tool that I have. It's a third party. And I was looking to say, okay, from a technical standpoint,

03:17what's happening? I was looking for canonical errors, no index tags, maybe broken internal links,

03:22maybe an error within the sitemap. None of those issues existed, which was kind of surprising.

03:27So I thought, okay, well, there's a traffic drop and they're soft 404s, but these tools are not

03:32picking it up. Then I asked my client to send me over their master HT access file. So about two weeks

03:38prior, we were talking about, hey, we need to fix this duplicate issue that we have on the site.

03:43It's causing Googlebot and also Bingbot to crawl many versions of every page. Even though there's

03:47the right canonical, we have to have just one version. The way that the HT access was set up

03:52for this master redirect was actually causing this soft 404. Now, I don't have access to the HT

03:56access file, but when I got the script, I actually put it into chat GPT. And I said, you know,

04:01try to decipher this. Let me understand. Can this cause soft 404s? It actually was.

04:04We went through and then we removed it. Now with the removal of that within the HT access file,

04:10our traffic, as I go back up to the very beginning is rebounding, which is great. So it's this part

04:14over here. We are getting that rebound effect. That is good, but this is still not the permanent

04:18fix. So for my client, I've always let them know, hey, like this is a good, this is better than

04:22obviously having like 95% of our pages removed, but it's still not going to allow us at our traffic

04:27potential. But overall though, this is a much better spot to be in. We'll fix the HT access file at some

04:32point probably in December. But for now we caught the issue and their traffic's in rebound. And just

04:38to kind of put this in further context, SEO makes up about 40 to 50% of their overall traffic summary

04:44and sales. So a lot of times when I talk to potential clients, they'll ask me, hey, what's

04:49the value of having you on, you know, like on a monthly basis? It's actually for this, keeping an eye

04:53on your account, you know, obviously making changes, either adding landing pages, schema markup,

04:57whatever we need to do from a continuous standpoint, but also making sure we're keeping an eye on rankings

05:01on a daily basis, technical crawls, and also traffic patterns. If anything is in the anomaly,

05:06we can spot it. We can try to figure out what the problem is and we can fix it because ultimately

05:10if this went on, let's say for another week or two, traffic would have been down by 90%.

05:14All of a sudden that would have been a major issue. It would have missed projections and would have

05:19probably caused us to run more Google ads to make up that traffic. Basically not a good thing.

05:24So anyway, that's the video. I hope this maybe sparks some ideas of what you guys can do for your

05:28account. Keep an eye on it. Let me know if you have any questions and as always, have a good rest of

05:32your day.

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