[donatj]

About six months ago Ahrefs recommended I remove some Unicode from the pathing on a personal project. Easy enough. Change the routing, set up permanent redirects for the old paths to the new paths.

I used to work for an SEO firm, I have a decent idea of best practices for this sort of thing.

BAM, I went from thousands of indexed pages to about 100

See screenshot:

https://x.com/donatj/status/1937600287826460852

It's been six months and never recovered. If I were a business I would be absolutely furious. As it stands this is a tool I largely built for myself so I'm not too bothered but I don't know what's going on with Google being so fickle.

Updated screenshots;

https://x.com/donatj/status/1999451442739019895

[dmboyd]

It’s probably also reflective of the fact that google are throwing all their new resources at AI, as soon as you’ve hit cache invalidation you’re gone, and anything new that’s crawled is probably ranked differently in the post llm world.

[motbus3]

They already scouted all content they needed. Sites are now competition for their AI systems

[AznHisoka]

Lesson: if its working, dont fix it

[mohas]

exactly my experience, suddenly thousands of non indexed pages, never figured out why, had to disband the business as it was content website selling ads.

[account42]

Good riddance.

[mohas]

now I don't have clients and I'm poor :(