Reply To: Traffic tanked after a clean-up

Yeah, that sounds like a cleanup side effect to me, not some random “Google woke up angry” thing. I’ve seen the same pattern when a site was quietly propped up by a bunch of crap pages and weak internal paths. You remove that stuff and suddenly the money pages aren’t getting the same crawl frequency or internal weight, even if they didn’t change much themselves. The “impressions still there, clicks dead” bit usually means the page is still in the mix but it’s not holding position cleanly anymore. What I’d check first is whether you nuked any links that were basically doing more work than they looked like. Also worth looking at crawl logs or at least GSC crawl stats if you’ve got them, because sometimes the page is still indexed but getting visited less often, and then it starts drifting. Page 2 -> gone -> back for a day -> gone again is very “re-evaluation / reweighting” behavior, not necessarily a hard penalty. If you already did the cleanup, I’d honestly stop touching it for a bit. Every little follow-up tweak after a prune just makes it harder to tell what actually caused the wobble.