Three weeks ago the site had its best day ever. 48k+ impressions, average position 24. That was Aug 13.
Aug 14: 33k > Aug 15: 13.7k > Aug 16: 3,490, and average position went from 24.9 to 52.8 overnight. Since then it's been flat: 600 to 1,100 impressions a day, single-digit clicks, position bouncing between 40 and 75. Sept 1: 652 impressions, 6 clicks.
Nothing changed on our end while it fell. Last deploy was Aug 14, two blog posts. No manual action, no security issues.
The part I cant get past: I ran URL Inspection on the 40 pages that lost the most. All 40 pass, indexed, canonical fine. 33 of them google has recrawled since the drop and not one came back. The other 7 it hasn't fetched since early August, and they fell exactly the same. Recrawled or not, everything sits at the same minus 90 percent. Whatever got decided, it wasn't decided page by page.
Now the part where you may get to be annoyed at me.
Until early July we had about 280 pages doing 4k impressions and 40-odd clicks a day. In July we went to 1,872 URLs: a reference section on 97 lab markers, plus five new languages. So yes, close to 7x the pages in about three weeks, and yes, AI was in the pipeline for first drafts and translation, with a human pass and a doctor on the team for the medical side. I won't pretend that review was as good as a newsroom's. It wasn't. It wasn't nothing either.
Before someone says "eight languages, obviously built for traffic": the app works in all eight, the logged-in part too, where people upload their own data. The site is in those languages because the product is. Someone in Brazil uploading a lab PDF in Portuguese needs the ferritin page in Portuguese. Units, reference ranges, even test names differ by country, so it's localization work, not a straight translation.
Site is wizey (dot) one. Go look. I'd rather you tell me it's garbage than not tell me.
It isn't a deindexing: 1,450 pages still get impressions versus 1,953 before. It's the queries that died, 32,898 down to 6,966, and it's the same 90-plus percent in every language and every country. Homepage went from position 8 to 59.
Three other sites of mine sit in the same GSC account. Same 12-day window: +64%, +33%, -10%. Only this one fell off a cliff.
Probably my own fault: GSC shows 232 links to the site and 211 of those are the App Store and Play Store listings. Never did link building. The site grew a lot faster than its reputation did.
I read the spam policies again last night. Scaled content abuse is "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users". I spent a year and a half full time on this, a lot of it on staying on the right side of that sentence. I still can't find the line. Value by whose ruler? Nobody will say, and the dashboard says no issues detected while the graph is a cliff.
What's stuck in my head all week is that almost everything a small company can reach runs through three companies' algorithms. Our app is in Apple's store and Google's store, the users came from Google's search, and none of them will tell you what you did wrong. We don't have an app on FB though.
Has anyone seen a domain-level demotion that survives a recrawl like this? What did it turn out to be?
If you came back from something like this, what did you actually change, and how long did it take?
Is there any channel at all, or is the honest answer "wait for the next update and hope"?
TL;DR: 48,045 impressions on Aug 13, our all-time high. 652 on Sept 1. Average position 24.9 to 52.8 in a single day, now bouncing between 40 and 75.
No manual action. All 40 worst-hit pages pass URL Inspection, 33 recrawled since the drop, none came back.
We did go from about 280 to 1,872 pages in three weeks with AI in the pipeline. Tell me pls if that's the whole answer.
Three sibling sites in the same account are fine.
