Site Performance Crisis — Asymmetric Applications (2025-12-12)

Overview

During the ^[1], Mark and Karly identified a significant and ongoing traffic decline on the Asymmetric Applications company website. The issue was flagged as top priority for immediate investigation.

The problem has two compounding signals: a sharp drop in Google Search impressions and a massive volume of server-side 400 errors, both suggesting a structural problem with site indexing or URL routing.

Symptoms

Signal	Detail
Traffic drop	Impressions down ~25% over the last 30 days
Peak comparison	Previously receiving ~9,000 impressions/day; now near zero
400 errors	86,000 "page not found" errors in server logs
De-indexed pages	Multiple pages visible in Search Console as de-indexed (primarily blog posts)

"Back in here, we were getting 9,000 impressions a day. Right now, we're getting nothing."
— Mark Hope

Suspected Causes

Broken URLs / missing redirects: The volume of 400 errors strongly suggests pages that were previously indexed by Google are no longer resolving — likely due to URL structure changes, deleted content, or a failed migration step.
Google de-indexing: Some pages have been explicitly de-indexed in Search Console, though these appear to be lower-quality blog posts rather than core service pages.
Server instability as a contributing factor: The site shares a server with ~60 other client sites. Bot traffic on the ^[2] site was causing server-wide 500 errors and bandwidth spikes around the same period, which may have contributed to crawl failures. See ^[3].

Investigation Priorities

Audit 400 errors — Pull the full list of URLs returning 404/400 from server logs and cross-reference against previously indexed URLs in Google Search Console.
Check redirect coverage — Identify any URLs that were changed or removed without corresponding 301 redirects.
Search Console review — Examine the Coverage and Pages reports for patterns in de-indexed or excluded URLs.
Crawl the site — Run a fresh crawl to identify broken internal links and orphaned pages.
Correlate timeline — Determine whether the traffic drop aligns with a deployment, plugin update, or the server bandwidth events.

Action Items

[ ] Mark Hope — Investigate 400 errors and traffic drop; identify and fix broken URLs, missing redirects, and indexing issues
[ ] Karly Oykhman — Review Search Console alongside Mark; assist with identifying affected pages

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