Reply To: Weird traffic drop after cleanup

[pixelwitch]

Honestly, yeah, that’s pretty normal in my experience. The annoying part is you never know if it’s the cleanup itself or just Google taking its sweet time to reprocess everything. The internal links thing is the one I’d watch closest. I’ve had “junk” pages end up doing some sneaky work for crawl paths or just keeping a few long-tail terms alive, and once they’re gone the site looks worse for a bit. Doesn’t mean the cleanup was wrong, just means the site lost some weird little support structure. I’d honestly stop touching it for now. If you keep fiddling every day, you’ll never know what actually caused the dip.