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SEO crash after tightening Cerber/Wordfence. Crawl dropped, indexing broken, traffic down

Hi,

I really need help because my developer doesn't seem to understand the issue.

I’m managing my WordPress site solo and SEO is crucial for me it's how I grow. Around June 5,6, after tightening my Wordfence because of brute force attacks my organic traffic collapsed.

At first, I saw tons of 404 and 503 responses to malicious bots trying to scan for vulnerabilities.But days later, I realized I’d also blocked legitimate visitors unintentionally.

Google’s crawl requests dropped from 467/day (May 24) to approximately 160/day now, even though I’m publishing everyday.

I now have 84 pages in 404 in GSC.

New articles won’t index even with manual submission. Message : Error 404.

LinkedIn previews don’t load. I've been using WordPress since one year and a half. Never had this problem before.

I removed Wordfence and my developer downloaded Cerber because he knows it better. According to him, Cerber isn’t blocking anything but I suspect it’s silently filtering good bots like Googlebot or social crawlers.

Traffic is very slowly coming back, but nowhere near where it was. I used to get 100,150 visits/day. Now it's 30,60.

I’m lost, can I fix this on my own ? I already had to pay for fixing the issue with the bots. Otherwise should I look for a technical SEO expert ? A server/firewall specialist ? Is there a way to audit what Cerber may be silently blocking?

Any tips or shared experiences would help a lot. Thanks.

submitted by /u/rama__d
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/9VhzkY2
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