Google Search Console

Blueprint schematic of a Google Search Console Page Indexing report with a soft 404 warning panel and a declining traffic line chart dropping from 15K to 2K daily clicks.

The Soft 404 Pattern That Cost a News Network 90% of Its Search Traffic

A multinational news network lost 90% of its Google search traffic in 10 months after a domain migration triggered a wave of soft 404 errors and crawl-budget waste. At peak, its Brazilian property had 513,369 pages crawled but not indexed and 1,193 soft 404s flagged in Search Console.

Blueprint-style technical chart showing Search Console impressions inflated above clicks across May 2025 to April 2026 timeline with corrupted data window annotation

Google Won't Backfill 50 Weeks of Bad Search Console Data

Google fixed a Search Console logging error that overstated impressions from May 13, 2025 to April 27, 2026. The fix only restores accuracy going forward. The 50 weeks of inflated historical data will stay in place permanently. That means anyone reporting year-over-year impressions through July 2026 is comparing real numbers

Blueprint diagram of a browser back button blocked by an interstitial, with history.pushState code and a Google Search Console warning notification overlay.

Google's Back-Button Hijacking Warnings Are Catching Sites That Don't Hijack

Google began mailing Search Console warnings for back-button hijacking on April 27, 2026, two weeks after announcing the new spam policy on April 13. Publishers have until June 15 to remove the offending code before automated demotions and manual actions begin. The first batch of notices is based on a

Blueprint schematic of a Google Search Console impressions chart with the May 2025 to April 2026 inflation window highlighted alongside an AI Overviews CTR rebound curve.

The AI Overviews CTR Rebound Tracks Google's Impressions Bug, Not a SERP Shift

Seer Interactive's April 2026 study of 53 brands and 2.43 billion impressions reports organic CTR on AI Overview queries climbed from 1.3% (December 2025) to 2.4% (February 2026), an 85% increase. That window overlaps Google's 11-month Search Console impressions bug, disclosed April 3

Blueprint-style illustration of Search Console dashboard, PageSpeed Insights scores, and robots.txt file with crawl error indicators

The Technical SEO Checklist You Can Run Without an Engineer

Seventy-two percent of websites fail at least one critical technical SEO factor, according to Semrush's 2025 Website Health Benchmark Report. Most published checklists respond with 40+ items that require a developer to implement. This guide covers the 11 checks a marketing team can run in under two hours

Blueprint-style diagram of a website sitemap being pruned with pages removed and Search Console traffic charts trending upward

Content Pruning: When Deleting Pages Makes Everything Else Rank Better

Content pruning is the practice of removing, consolidating, or noindexing underperforming pages so search engines evaluate your remaining content more favorably. Google's Helpful Content System scores quality at the site level, which means weak pages actively suppress strong ones. One e-commerce retailer pruned 10% of its blog and

Search Console dashboard blueprint showing inflated impression graph with hidden logging error revealed beneath the data

Google's Impression Bug Ran for 11 Months Before Anyone Noticed

If you pulled Search Console impression data in the last year to build a report, make a case for more budget, or demonstrate SEO progress to someone who signs checks, part of what you showed them was wrong. Google disclosed today that a logging error in Search Console has been