Sitemap URLS missing?

Hey guys, I've been working on one of my sites for a few months, and I managed to get it ranking for a few keywords it was doing great! But over the past few days, the clicks suddenly dropped to zero.

Before this happened, I removed the categories from Google because I was concerned about duplicate content. After that, I noticed the clicks dropping to zero, which is abnormal based on what I usually get daily.

I told crawlers not to index the categories through YOAST, and I also manually removed the category URLs from Google Search Console.

I've worked really hard on the articles everything is human-made, high-quality content. But now, I can't understand what happened. There are no manual actions, no issues flagged at all.

So, today, I resubmitted the sitemap with the category URLs set to be indexable again, and now I’m waiting to see if that fixes things. Has anyone else encountered an issue like this?

If you got traffic on indexed page like “example.com/post1”, the problem is not the category.
If you got traffic from “example.com/category/“, so yes, the problem can be this.
Probably you got traffic from the post url, so I don’t think the problem is related to the category deindex request.

Can you find the post with the command site? If yes, the problem is another. Check with site:example.com/post1.

As removing and re-adding category URLs, may have caused temporary indexing issues. I recommend ensuring that all critical URLs are in your sitemap and using Google Search Console's "URL Inspection" tool to request indexing. Confirm that your Yoast settings now allow indexing for categories.

The sitemap problem is common and happens from time to time, more common if your sitemap doesn't include direct page links,
Submit the posts, pages, categories & authors sitemaps separately and hopefuly they get crawled and fetched without problems,

Lawliet1996 said:

Before this happened, I removed the categories from Google because I was concerned about duplicate content. After that, I noticed the clicks dropping to zero, which is abnormal based on what I usually get daily.

I told crawlers not to index the categories through YOAST, and I also manually removed the category URLs from Google Search Console.

Click to expand...

Did you block google bots via robots.txt or added noindex to the categories?
Which pages were getting the traffic and ranking? are you sure it's not the categories pages themselves?

Noindex pages tend to pass less link juice,
So if your internal linking is it not as great, you're basically blocking the authority & link juice to flow to inner pages,

It could be some cooleration of your website getting penalized/devaluated for whatever other reasons as well,
There was a Google update running last month and could be one of the possible reasons

What do you mean by "removed the categories from Google"?

Did you noindex the categories? Did you straight up delete them? Did you remove them from your sitemap?

What kind of site are you running? Is it ecommerce where categories are PLPs? Is it informational/blogging where categories are filtering on articles?