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Impressions fell off a cliff overnight and pages are getting deindexed. Wtf happened?
Posted by on May 13, 2026 at 1:14 amHey guys. My organic traffic just completely flatlined and I'm trying to figure out what went wrong.
Everything was growing nicely in search console and then around April 24th it just fell off a cliff. I checked GSC and there are zero manual actions or security issues.
To make things worse, I noticed Google also started deindexing my pages. They are just dropping out of the index one by one.
It’s an educational/writing tools site if that matters. I didn't make any crazy technical changes before this happened either.
Has anyone dealt with a drop this bad recently? Is it some sort of algorithmic penalty or an unannounced update? Honestly kind of lost right now on what I should even check first. Any advice would be a lifesaver.
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Hey u/Various_Educator_756
Welcome to SEO – we have the best team of SEO experts assembled – maybe these questions will help people help you:
* De-indexed or De-ranked?
* Are the pages in any error buckets?
* Blocked
* 404
* 5XX
* Crawled, Not discovered
* How long were you ranking
* How many pages had clicks in the past 28 days
* and past 7 days
* What keywords did you rank for/.
* How many backlinks did you have
* What was your backlink strategy
* How many pages lost clicks -
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if pages are getting deindexed too, it’s prob more of a quality/trust issue than just rankings. a lot of ai/writing tool sites got hit recently from algo changes. i’d check for thin/scaled content, indexing issues, robots/noindex mistakes, and whether google still sees the pages as useful.
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I went through something similar with a theme marketplace – though it played out differently. For about two weeks traffic spiked in a weird way, impressions were looking great and we were happy but something felt off. Then over the next two weeks we lost 80% of traffic and impressions dropped off a cliff. Took almost two months to fully recover.
Recent updates have been heavily targeting thin, templated and AI generated content at scale. Check whether your pages fall into any of those categories – even unintentionally. Similar feature pages, near duplicate descriptions, low original value per page – these are the kind of things that get flagged fast.
Check if the deindexed pages are showing as “Crawled but not indexed” in GSC or just vanishing entirely. That tells you whether it’s a quality signal or something technical.
Also check internal linking – orphaned pages with no internal links get deindexed fast.
Recovery typically takes 4-8 weeks minimum after fixes are made.
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Seems like you got penalized.
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Did your clicks tank?
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