Health-testing store: recovering after an SEO plugin outage
On a WooCommerce store selling health tests, the SEO plugin was briefly switched off. Afterward, Search Console indexing, organic traffic, and referrals from AI assistants all fell. The owner isn't technical and needed someone to diagnose it, fix it, and prove the recovery.
My role
Diagnosis, fixes, and verification in three paid milestones, under a HIPAA and nondisclosure agreement because the site handles protected health information.
What happens when an SEO plugin goes off
On WordPress, the SEO plugin usually generates the titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, robots directives, structured data, and XML sitemaps. Turn it off, even briefly, and crawlers can see pages without canonicals, with default titles, or with sitemaps that suddenly disappear. Turning it back on doesn't instantly undo what search engines recorded in the meantime.
What I did
- URL inspections of the priority product and information pages in Search Console.
- Crawl statistics reviewed for changes in how often Googlebot visited and what it fetched.
- Sitemaps checked and resubmitted in both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- A priority list of pages to watch through the recovery.
- Structured data, Cloudflare configuration, and ghost traffic in GA4 reviewed as part of the same scope.
How it was checked
Several indicators compared over time instead of one dashboard, with care to separate a stale report from a fault that was still happening. The owner received before-and-after evidence in plain language.
Status
Recovery checks under way, with possible next steps including redirects, merchant structured data, and crawler policy. See Search Console and analytics.
Updated October 5, 2026