Reply To: Weird traffic drop after cleanup

Yeah, I’ve seen that too. Half the time the “cleanup” just exposes some weird dependency you didn’t realize was doing anything. I’d be looking at what changed in crawl paths and internal flow more than the thin pages themselves. I’ve had sites dip for a couple weeks after pruning junk, then settle back once Google stopped reworking things. Annoying as hell, but not always a sign you broke it. That said, if you nuked a bunch of pages and changed links at the same time, it’s hard to tell which part is the culprit. I’d leave it alone for a bit instead of stacking more changes on top. At least lately.