Reply To: Weird traffic drop after cleanup

[pixelwitch]

Yeah, I’ve had that too. Usually right after a cleanup too, which is the annoying part. If you changed a bunch of stuff at once, I wouldn’t even trust the numbers for a bit. Google seems to do that stupid little wobble where it re-evaluates the site and everything looks worse before it settles. Thin pages disappearing can also drag down those random long-tail visits for a while. The internal links part is the one I’d be side-eyeing though. I’ve definitely cut off pages that were quietly doing something useful and didn’t notice until traffic dipped. Not saying that’s what happened here, but it’s the first thing I’d check before blaming the cleanup itself. I’d probably leave it alone for a week or two and see if it stabilizes. If you keep tweaking it every day, you never really know what caused what.