Reply To: Traffic tanked after yesterday’s crawl

From my experience, yeah, “right after a crawl” is usually people forcing a pattern onto it. If clicks cratered but impressions are still hanging around, I’d be looking at query mix, URL swap, or snippet/title changes first. Google loves swapping in some worse URL for no obvious reason and then acting like nothing happened. Also, if it was a big crawl spike, I’d check logs before anything else. Sometimes the crawl is just the symptom and the real issue is canonical weirdness, parameter junk, or the crawler deciding half your pages are duplicates again. Mason’s “instant faceplant” take is still too clean for how messy this usually is. Google doesn’t need a real update to wreck a site for a day or two.