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.
