Patch your site's PHP today, a big hole is coming
One well known developer pulled every one of his websites offline this morning and told everyone else with a PHP site to do the same before the fix lands at 2 PM UTC. PHP runs most of the web, including most WordPress sites.
Read the whole week in one goRank trackers were wrong all week. Check Search Console.
Why your traffic moved
Some sites vanished from Google then came back a week later
Two sites in the same niche disappeared from Google entirely last Sunday, even for their own brand name, then returned on Friday 10/16 at 8:15PM, Glenn Gabe reports after speaking to both owners. He says it is on Google's end, the second time he has seen this in about a month, and guesses a security algorithm misfired.
The tracking tools are not picking up the entire picture btw.
Who this affects: Anyone who sees their whole site drop out of Google overnight.
- If everything vanishes at once, wait a week before major changes.
- Search your own brand name to confirm a drop is real.
Getting into AI answers
Google lists the ways to keep your pages out of AI answers
Google updated its help document on controlling what you share with Search, Barry Schwartz reported. It now lists the existing options together, including the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag and the Search generative AI control. Nothing changed about how your site works, Google just put the settings in one place.
Who this affects: Site owners wondering how to limit what Google's AI answers use.
- Do nothing, these controls also cut your normal search visibility.
Do not do this
A serious PHP hole is being patched today
A critical flaw in PHP (the software most websites, including WordPress, run on) gets a patch at 2 PM UTC today. Developer @levelsio says he disconnected all his sites and servers until then, and that 69.3% of the web runs on PHP.
People won't update fast enough and the vulnerability will be out in the wild once the patch hits as anyone can reverse engineer it based on the patch
Who this affects: Anyone with a WordPress site or any site running PHP.
- Ask your host today whether they have applied the PHP patch.
- Our take: take a full backup before anyone touches the server.