Misconfigured SSL.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Michael Martinez: Happened to us on two sites in early 2017. We got one to come back quickly. The other continues to struggle to this day, although we`ve more than doubled the traffic it received aefter the SSL crash. Only thing I can think of is that going too long with a broken SSL certificate may cause the index to "divorce" a site from older accrued link value. We haven`t done any link building for the site, although we have improved some of the content.
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  Scott Hodgkiss: Thanks for the feedback.. The SSL was only not configured correctly for 1 week, but all this started on the 15th of October, and looking at Moz Cast looks like Google made some kind of Algorythum change
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  Michael Martinez: Scott Hodgkiss There would be no connection between any perceived algorithm change (as measured by third-party SEO tools) and whatever is happening with your site. You could try submitting the sitemaps (if you have them) for a recrawl but it could take a few weeks to recover traffic. For what it`s worth, based on the above incident and some others, I suspect (but cannot prove) there may be about a 10-day window in which to recover from catastrophic failures without much long-term negative impact in Google`s search results.
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  Scott Hodgkiss: Michael Martinez thought I would update you, looks like the website got stung with Yoast SEO plugin error back in March.
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  Scott Hodgkiss: The error with the update allowed Google to index all bloody attachments (images) as pages, hence our thin content and ranking drops.
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  Scott Hodgkiss: Well the good thing come out of this is I have done a full website audit and we are working through mistakes, we did have a complete site relaunch in end of September and then we got the Mobile first index message in GSC.. So I am just going to have to keep monitoring it.