Traffic dropped again after indexing fix

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • #9069
      Mason
      Participant

      Anyone else seeing this crap? I finally got a few pages indexed properly last week and now traffic’s down like 30% for no obvious reason. Search Console looks “fine” of course, which is always a joke. I’m starting to think Google just messes with sites for fun at this point. Same pages, same links, nothing major changed. I even checked server logs because I was convinced something broke on my end. Could be one of those weird delayed hits from the last update, or maybe my parasite stuff got ignored harder than usual. Not sure. Just annoying as hell when you fix one problem and another one shows up right after. In my opinion,

    • #9265
      axelrowan
      Participant

      Yeah, sounds familiar. I’ve had that exact thing happen where the “indexing fix” just lines up with a traffic drop a few days later and you’re left staring at logs wondering what the hell changed. Search Console being “fine” means basically nothing half the time. If the pages are indexed but impressions tanked, I’d be looking at query mix / ranking shifts more than indexing itself. Google loves to reshuffle stuff without any clean signal, which is the annoying part. Also, if you’re running parasite stuff, I wouldn’t assume it’s the same behavior week to week. That stuff gets volatile fast. One crawl cycle it’s hanging around, next one it’s ignored harder and traffic falls off a cliff. Could be delayed update junk, could be SERP layout changes, could be your better-indexed pages getting swapped into worse queries. Hard to know without comparing actual query-level drops, not just the pretty little graphs Google throws at you. Personally,

    • #9415
      Den
      Participant

      Yeah, that’s the part that drives people nuts — “fixed” indexing and then the numbers still slide anyway. I’d be looking at query-level changes too, not just the page count. Half the time the pages are indexed and Google just quietly moves them around or swaps in different stuff. Search Console can look clean while traffic gets kneecapped. If parasite stuff is in the mix, I honestly wouldn’t trust it to stay stable for long. That stuff seems to get weird in waves. One week it’s fine, next week it’s basically gone. Probably worth checking if the drop is on a few pages/queries or across the whole site before chasing ghosts. And yeah, Google does feel like it’s messing…

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.