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My website dropped hard starting Jan 22. Looking for outside opinions on the cause and recovery order.
Posted by on February 11, 2026 at 7:30 pmMy website took a sustained hit starting around Jan 22, and I want outside opinions from people who have worked through similar drops.
I compared Search Console data from Jan 10 to Jan 16 with data from Jan 24 to Jan 30. Clicks fell about 51 percent, impressions fell about 54 percent, and average position got worse. CTR was slightly up, so this does not appear to be a title/meta problem. It looks like a visibility and ranking problem.
Most of the losses are in informational blog content, especially list-style pages and explainer pages. I also found that I have overlapping URLs targeting very similar intent, plus several year-stamped URLs with 2024 still in the slug. Desktop positions fell much harder than mobile.
My current read is that this is an algorithmic re-evaluation rather than a manual action, and that overlap plus stale year content likely amplified the drop.
For people who have recovered from this type of pattern, what would you tackle first: consolidating overlapping URLs, refreshing year-stamped content, noindexing low-value tag/archive pages, or something else? I’m looking for practical feedback from people who have actually done recovery work, not generic advice.
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1 Reply
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[removed]
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Good that you know your issues. Start with whichever you can fix quickest. Bear in mind a page with 2024 in the URL is probably only accurate until then, and needs more than a ctrl F for 2024 to 2026.
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I’ve dealt with this quite a bit. This is where I would list them by importance:
1. Consolidating overlapping URL’s – Assuming this is causing keyword cannibalization issues
2. Delete (don’t no-index) low-value pages
3. Do not refresh year-stamped content. A LOT has changed since 2024. Re-purpose the content to provide more value and be optimized for LLMs. Add some schema markup and some FAQ’s.We did this for a client in January, and before the end of January, we had already seen an all-time high in traffic.
Good luck!
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>lso found that I have overlapping URLs targeting very similar intent,
Intent Matching or similar slugs?
> algorithmic re-evaluation rather than a manual action,
Re-evaluation is a bit of a big word for Google – but a new update can cause pages to cannibalize
>I also found that I have overlapping URLs targeting very similar intent, plus several year-stamped URLs
Can you share the slugs?
>refreshing year-stamped content, noindexing low-value tag/archive pages
Google doesnt care about content age/freshnes or when it was last updated.
If you change wrod-keyword-segment-2024 to word-keyword-segment-2026 – you’re creating a new page
>noindexing low-value tag/archive pages,
If its not getting clicks but cannabalization can be hard to diagnoze.
You can also do a removal request/noindex and see if it changes anything
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I had this happen once and it was my site map. It completely blew up. It was corrupted and instead of showing something like 700 pages (recipe site) it showed like 70,000. Just throwing that out there.
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