Reply To: Traffic dropped after indexing finally caught up

[Pike]

Yep, that’s been my experience too. The “stable” phase before Google settles on the cleaner set is often kind of fake. Then it trims the fat and suddenly the site looks way smaller, which is annoying as hell if you were getting paid off those extra junky pages. And yeah, WP canonicals are still a mess on some setups. I’ve had logs show Googlebot wandering around the wrong stuff first…