Reply To: Traffic tanked after fixing my site

[Nathan]

Personally, yeah, I’ve seen that too. Usually it’s not “cleanup = penalty,” it’s more like you changed enough stuff at once that the site’s signals got shuffled and Google’s being dumb about it for a while. The part with the junk AI pages hanging around while the better stuff drops is annoying as hell, but I’ve had that same nonsense happen. If you changed internal links and the theme at the same time, I’d be looking there first.