Sites that vanished from Google came back nine days later
Glenn Gabe says sites that lost nearly all search visibility around September 4 have fully recovered, and nobody outside Google knows why.
Sites that lost almost all their Google visibility in early September have fully bounced back, and the recovery now looks confirmed across several of them. Glenn Gabe, who first reported the drops, says site owners emailed him over the weekend confirming the surges back, in Search and in Google Discover, the feed of articles on Android phones and in the Google app. Barry Schwartz picked it up and called the whole thing wild.
This is the same story we covered earlier, now with more sites reporting the same pattern.
What actually happened
Around September 3 into September 4, an unconfirmed update hit. Unconfirmed means Google never announced it. Some sites dropped close to 100 percent. Gabe says some were not even ranking for their own brand names, and the drops showed up in Search Console, Google's own free reporting tool, so they were not a measurement glitch.
Marie Haynes said she saw the same thing and thought it started around September 2. She noted that one site she looked at clearly had programmatic scaled content, meaning pages churned out in bulk from a template, and wondered if the drop was fallout from the late August spam update. She also floated a different theory, that changes in Google's Gemini models affected its ranking systems. Neither has been confirmed.
Then around September 13 it reversed. Gabe says a number of those same sites came all the way back on Friday into Saturday, including some in ultra sensitive money and health categories and some sports sites. For some, both Search and Discover recovered. For others, only Discover had been affected in the first place.
Why nobody can tell you the cause
Google has not said anything about this. Gabe's own summary is blunt about it.
So what exactly happened? Only Google knows.
So treat any explanation you read as a guess, including the spam update theory and the Gemini theory.
What to do
If your traffic fell off a cliff in early September, open Search Console, click Performance, and set the date range to cover September 1 to today. If the line dropped and has since climbed back, you were caught in this and there is nothing to fix. Do nothing.
If it dropped and stayed down, that is a different problem. Look at whether you have pages built in bulk from a template with a word swapped out, since that is the one pattern an SEO actually spotted in an affected site. Rewriting those into real pages that answer a real question is worth doing regardless of what caused this.
Gabe says this kind of swing has happened before and he has written about it over the years. Panic is not a strategy here.
A number of the sites that fell off a cliff around 9/4 completely surged back yesterday.
So what exactly happened? Only Google knows.