Hit 800 pages indexed then lost 400 in one Google update

I was sitting at 803 indexed pages on my main freelance site back in February. Felt great, traffic was climbing steady. Then the March core update hit and I dropped to 412 pages overnight. That was a brutal surprise. Most of them were blog posts I wrote for low-competition keywords that were probably too thin on value. Google basically wiped them out. Has anyone else seen big index drops after a core update like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

danielowens6d ago

I lost 400 pages overnight" - that sounds rough, but I have to wonder how much traffic those pages were actually bringing in. Google core updates tend to clean up stuff that wasn't doing much to begin with. If those blog posts were thin and written just for low-competition keywords, they probably weren't holding up your traffic in a meaningful way. I've seen a lot of people panic over index drops only to realize their main pages and revenue sources were untouched. Check your Search Console data and see what your core money pages are doing before you assume it's a disaster.

william_craig76d ago

That's a lot of panic over pages that probably weren't pulling their weight anyway. 400 pages disappearing sounds dramatic but if they were just filler content written for some long tail keywords they were never gonna convert. I bet if you look at the analytics those pages had maybe 10 visitors a month and zero revenue. People get so attached to having a huge site count that they forget quality matters more than quantity. Google's core updates usually just scrub the junk that was dragging down the overall site score. If the actual money pages are still ranking then this is just a digital spring cleaning with no real loss.

jennybailey6d ago

Whoa, wait, you said 400 pages? That is a massive number to just shrug off! I mean, even if they were thin pages, losing that many all at once feels like a huge red flag to me. @danielowens brought up a good point about checking the real money pages, but losing 400 pages could still mess with your site's authority in Google's eyes. It's not just about the traffic those pages had, it's about the whole site structure taking a hit. I get your point about quality over quantity, but 400 pages gone feels way too extreme for a simple cleanup.