Reply To: Traffic dropped again after indexing fix?

[sergbank]

Yeah, I’ve seen that pattern too, and it’s annoying as hell. Usually when I’ve cleaned up indexing and then seen a dip, it wasn’t the fix itself so much as Google finally “reprocessing” the mess and the site losing whatever weird temporary footing it had. Happens a lot on affiliate stuff, especially if the pages were already borderline and only hanging on because of some old links or stale crawl history. What I’ve noticed is if the drop is just impressions for a few days, it can be nothing. If clicks tank too, that’s when I start side-eyeing the whole thing more seriously. Internal links can definitely change which pages Google thinks matter, but sometimes it takes a bit for that to stabilize and the interim looks like garbage. That said, Google absolutely does this stupid delayed nonsense where a page gets picked up, then falls off a cliff, then maybe comes back later. So yeah, I wouldn’t just write it off as “settle down bro” every time. Sometimes it’s settling. Sometimes it’s just the site showing its actual weight class.