Reply To: Traffic tanked after a clean-up

[meloncrash]

Kind of feels like yeah, welcome to the fun part of “site cleanup” where Google acts like you kicked its dog. I’ve had pruning help, but I’ve also had it torch traffic for a bit cause the junk pages were doing more work than they looked like Honestly,. If you changed internal links and cut thin stuff all at once, I wouldn’t assume it’s some penalty thing — more likely you yanked a bunch of supporting signals and now the money pages are floating around with less context. That page 2 → gone → back for a day thing is classic nonsense too. I’d stop touching it for a bit unless you know you broke a canonical/redirect/orphan situation. Otherwise you just keep feeding the machine more chaos. Sure. Okay then.