Traffic dropped to absolute zero overnight after index bloat issue (3 months later, still no recovery). Need advice.
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...