Reply To: Traffic tanked after a clean-up

[axelrowan]

Personally, yeah, that’s not crazy. I’ve seen cleanups do that too, especially if some of those “junk” URLs were quietly feeding crawl paths or just keeping the site’s internal graph a bit denser than it looked on paper. The annoying part is you can’t really tell from GSC alone whether it’s just reprocessing or you actually cut off something useful. If the money pages lost a bunch of internal links, even “low value” ones, that can be enough to make them wobble for a while. Google seems to recalc that stuff in bursts instead of smoothly, which is why you get the page 2 / vanished / brief rebound nonsense. I’d be looking at: – internal link counts before/after – whether any old URLs were getting real impressions and got 301’d/404’d – crawl stats for the money pages – if the canonical / noindex setup changed anywhere by accident And honestly, if you just finished pruning, stop messing with it for a bit. Every extra tweak right after a cleanup just makes the whole thing harder to read. Google already acts weird enough without us helping it 😒 From what I see,