Hey everyone, I need some advice on a sudden and sustained traffic drop: The Run-Up: The site was growing steadily until June 12 (last day nearly 900 impressions and 30 clicks), reaching solid daily impressions and clicks. The Crash: Literally overnight around June 12-14, Google impressions and clicks crashed to near zero and have stayed flatlined ever since. Bing Contrast: Meanwhile, Bing still sends around 30–60 clicks/day steadily. What likely triggered it (Index Bloat): A single page was accidentally indexed as 500–600 distinct URLs due to URL query parameters. Once the traffic crashed and I realized what happened: First, I blocked those query parameter URLs in robots.txt . Later, realizing Google needs to crawl them to drop them, I unblocked them from robots.txt and added a noindex tag to all parameterized URLs (along with canonicals pointing to the clean page). It has been nearly 3 months since the fix, but Google impressions are still flat zero across the ent...
Google's u/johnmu went off again on programmatic SEO, this time saying that programmatic SEO can "often leads to a site that's either spam, borderline spam, or low quality," he wrote. These tactics can often lead Google's "systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages," he added. He posted this on Bluesky adding, "It's easy to spin something up with many pages, it's hard to provide real value to users." And he then noted that if your site is not performing well over programmatic SEO, he said, "Resolving this tends to take time & significant effort to show the value." Basically, John said that once Google loses faith in the value of your content on your site, it can take many months and a lot of effort to gain that trust back and start to rank again. Here is his full post: Regarding the site you describe, it's hard to say, but I worry a bit because it sou...