Reply To: Weird traffic drop after cleanup

[hankroot]

Technically, yeah, I’ve had that happen. Usually it’s not “Google hates cleanup,” it’s more like you changed enough signals at once that it takes a bit to stop wobbling. The internal links thing is the part I’d watch first. I’ve seen sites lose some weird little traffic pockets just because a few pages stopped getting passed any juice at all. Removing thin pages is fine, but if they were propping up other junk pages or even just helping crawl paths, the drop can look nastier before it settles. I wouldn’t touch anything else for a week or two, honestly. That’s where people screw it up — they panic, start “fixing” the fix, and then…