Traffic dropped and pages were removed from the index after server problems

Hi!
I would be glad to receive any advice.


There were problems on the server on December 3-5, and the site often returned a 503 error when crawled by Google.
(In Google Search Console reports - Failed crawl requests - Visible on the graph)

Starting from December 7th and up to today, the site pages began to fall out of the index and therefore the traffic almost disappeared.

The graphs show a drop of Indexing pages and also growth of Crawled - currently not indexed

What are your ideas to reanimate the site again?
Thanks!

That's just a correlation, it has nothing to do with the server downtime,
It's most likely getting penalized for spam, could be expected with 100K+ pages,

"Crawled - Not currently indexed" clearly indicates that these pages were crawled, it's not because of the 503 errors,
There was a core update that took down plenty of websites in December, so is the case for your website

garikm said:

Hi!
I would be glad to receive any advice.


There were problems on the server on December 3-5, and the site often returned a 503 error when crawled by Google.
(In Google Search Console reports - Failed crawl requests - Visible on the graph)

Starting from December 7th and up to today, the site pages began to fall out of the index and therefore the traffic almost disappeared.

The graphs show a drop of Indexing pages and also growth of Crawled - currently not indexed

What are your ideas to reanimate the site again?
Thanks!

Click to expand...

97k pages? do you run an automation site? or did you publish content through AI

David Boost said:

97k pages? do you run an automation site? or did you publish content through AI

Click to expand...

Yes, it's automation website (some sort of Programmatic SEO). But I'm still sure that this is not the problem.

Today I found articles and comments by Mueller about the 503 error for robots.txt.


That if the crawler receives such a response, it stops crawling the site (in my case there were problems with server responses for a couple of days).

And maybe in a few months it will try again...

It's just not clear how to fix it all, without expecting that it will fix itself sometime in a few months

garikm said:

Hi!
I would be glad to receive any advice.


There were problems on the server on December 3-5, and the site often returned a 503 error when crawled by Google.
(In Google Search Console reports - Failed crawl requests - Visible on the graph)

Starting from December 7th and up to today, the site pages began to fall out of the index and therefore the traffic almost disappeared.

The graphs show a drop of Indexing pages and also growth of Crawled - currently not indexed

What are your ideas to reanimate the site again?
Thanks!

Click to expand...

That sounds frustrating! I’ve seen this happen before, and the good news is you can recover. Here’s what I’d do:

Fix Stability First – If your server isn’t 100% stable yet, fix that ASAP. Google won’t trust a site that keeps going down.

Request Reindexing – Go to Google Search Console and manually request indexing for key pages. This speeds things up.

Update & Strengthen Content – Google might have lost confidence in your site. Refresh important pages with new content, internal links, and better optimization.

Build Some Fresh Backlinks – A few high-quality links (guest posts, niche edits) can signal to Google that your site is still valuable.

Monitor Logs & Crawling – Use server logs and GSC reports to ensure Googlebot isn’t still facing issues.

Give it some time, but be proactive. I’ve seen sites bounce back in a few weeks when done right!

Delete the sitemap in GSC and send it again. And wait some days.