Forums › Forums › White Hat SEO › Is core web vitals important? › Reply To: Is core web vitals important?
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AbleInvestment2866
GuestOctober 10, 2025 at 4:38 pmThere has to be another reason. You (and I mean your whole infrastructure, including your hosting) must have done something before July, probably in the two or three months prior. You don’t lose 73% overnight because of content or authority; it makes absolutely no sense. If you had good enough content and authority to have 140k before you got hit, then it’s nonsensical to think everything went bonkers the next day. The only logical explanation is a technical issue, so think carefully about what could have happened. Sadly, changing a theme and making it faster not only won’t help, but it might hide the real issue. Whatever it was, it was affected by the June core update, which ended in mid-July.
Anyway, take this as a checklist:
* besides thinking about any possible changes, check GA4 (hopefully you use it) and see if you had any weird spikes or anomalies such as bot attacks, sudden bursts of traffic, or strange referrals. Keep in mind this happened before the hit, so check April to June at least.
* Check your current referrals. Which source was most affected? Google? AI? Direct traffic? Other search engines? If only Google, that reinforces the idea of a technical issue. In our experience, 90% of the time when Google takes you down like that, it’s because of a JavaScript problem. Think of any script or plugin you added.
* Check your competitors. What happened to them? If they simply moved up to your previous positions, then it’s a problem on your end for sure. However, if you see new competitors you hadn’t noticed before, then there’s probably some parasite or PSEO sites that took you (and your competitors) down.
* Last but not least, there’s a chance this isn’t technical but related to your own actions. Were you spamming or using low-quality links or black-hat tactics? If so, that’s the explanation, though I doubt it, because if it were that bad, you’d be deindexed completely.