Reply To: Traffic dropped after pages got indexed

Honestly, Yeah, pretty much matches what I’ve been seeing too. The part people keep glossing over is that “indexed” is just a checkpoint, not a ranking signal by itself. Google’s perfectly happy to crawl something, stick it in the index, let it sniff a few impressions, then shove it into the basement if it doesn’t like the site/section/history enough. I’d be a lot more interested in: – where the page sits internally – whether it’s getting any real crawl follow-up – if the folder it lives in is already weak – whether the site has enough overall trust for new URLs to stick And yeah, affiliate stuff seems to get the short end of it even harder lately. I’ve seen pages get indexed in hours and then just flatline unless they’re supported by older URLs with some actual history. So I don’t think you’re crazy here. It’s not always a “content bad” issue, sometimes Google just doesn’t want to give the new page any real weight.