Reply To: Traffic tanked after a clean-up

[hankroot]

Personally, personally, yeah, that’s the part that always makes me side-eye these cleanups. I’ve had sites where pruning obvious junk helped, and I’ve had others where the “cleaner” version just bled for a couple weeks because the money pages lost all the messy little support pages around them. Google seems to love acting like it’s “settling” when really it’s just reacting to a bunch of signals you changed at once. If impressions are still there but clicks died, that usually smells more like ranking/placement weirdness than a total deindexing thing. The page 2 one vanishing and then bouncing back for a day is annoyingly normal too. Not saying it’s fine, just saying it doesn’t automatically mean you broke the site. I’d be looking at whether you nuked any pages that were internally feeding those money pages more than you thought. That’s usually where the damage is. From what I see,