A week or so ago, I reported that there was an issue with Google Search labeling real content pages as soft 404s, and thus not ranking those pages in Google Search. This bug directly seemed to have caused traffic issues for these sites. Well, that bug seems now to be mostly, if not fully, resolved.

I did ask Google for an official statement but Google would not comment outside of what has been said publicly by John Mueller of Google that I covered in my original story.

What seems to have happened was that some bug led Google to label pages that were ranking well and had real content on them as 404 (page not found) pages. This resulted in Google dropping those pages out of the index and those pages stopped getting traffic from Google Search.

Things started to improve a few days ago:

And as of yesterday, it seems things returned to normal:

Again, Google would not give me an official statement but this is what John Mueller of Google said earlier on:

John did add that the reason Google won’t go into detail is that it did not affect many:

Forum discussion at Twitter.