Traffic fell after
a change. Now what?
When a page is deleted or its address changes without a redirect, the searches it earned can disappear within days. Recovery starts with finding exactly which addresses lost traffic, then giving each one a working home again.
Which pages,
which queries.
In Google Search Console, compare two equal date windows on the Pages report, before and after the drop. Sort by clicks lost. The pages at the top, and the queries they used to answer, are your recovery list.
Check the Pages indexing report for “Not found (404)” and redirect errors, and test old addresses directly in a browser. If you no longer have the old addresses, the Search Console page export and old sitemaps usually do.
Give each address
a working home.
If the deleted page answered a real question, the strongest fix is often to rebuild it at its original address. Ang Brothers Funeral Services had lost its condolence money guide; it was rebuilt at the same address in August 2026. In Singapore it recorded 0 clicks in July, 65 in August and 138 in September. It had earned 120 in March, so this was recovered demand, not new demand. The record sets out the limits.
If the content has a better new home, redirect the old address permanently to the single closest page. Avoid sending everything to the home page, and keep each redirect to one hop.
Images and old
addresses count too.
Migrations often break image addresses and older URL formats as well as pages. On Welo Chiropractic’s migration, 133 broken image addresses and 378 redirects from older addresses were repaired on 30 September 2026, five weeks after the move. That record shows the search figures from the same period, which did not improve overall.
Update internal links to point straight at the live pages, and resubmit the sitemap once the fixes are live.
Google needs time
to notice.
Google has to recrawl the old address, see the redirect and move its signals. At Four Solutions, an old car fumigation address had ranked in positions 2 to 6 for car cockroach searches; its replacement sat in positions 36 to 52 while Google caught up, and Google only recorded the redirect on 7 October 2026, weeks after it was put in place. Recovery of a ranking is not guaranteed.
Request indexing for the restored pages, then compare equal windows at about 14 and 28 days rather than checking every morning.
Log every
address change.
Keep a simple log of every URL change, deletion and redirect, with the date. When traffic moves, the log tells you what changed and when. Before a rebuild, follow the steps in protecting Google traffic during a rebuild.
Find what was lost
before rebuilding anything.
Send your website and roughly when the traffic dropped. We will compare the Search Console windows, list the addresses that lost traffic and propose the fixes before quoting any work.
Website design and development ↗
Combined SEO, AEO and GEO in Singapore ↗
Protecting traffic during a rebuild ↗
Ang Brothers record ↗
All Insights ↗
What’s holding
your business back?
A website that needs work. Customers who can’t find you. A team running on spreadsheets and messages. Start there.