My GitHub trending site lost 84% of its Google traffic in one day. Here's what I got wrong.
Quick context I'm a solo dev in Abidjan. On October 13 I launched Upstar , a site that ranks the GitHub repos taking off inside each topic: self-hosted, Rust, local LLMs, Android, agent skills, 69 topics so far. The idea is simple. GitHub Trending is one big list where the same giants win every day. On Upstar, every topic is its own little league, and growth is weighed against size. So a 300-star…
My GitHub trending site lost 84% of its Google traffic in one day. Upstar, a site ranking GitHub repos in topics like self-hosted, Rust, and local LLMs, saw its impressions drop from 6,450 to 1,031 and clicks from 147 to 54 on October 23. This was due to Googlebot fetching only 1,650 of my pages instead of the usual 16,500, as my site was mostly scaled content with little uniqueness.
Google's spam policies penalize such practices, causing the drop in traffic. To fix this, I removed 82% of the duplicate pages and updated the indexing rules. Now, only the top 10 of a topic in the last 7 days or pages that previously received a Google click are indexed. I also added explanations for each project's significance, redesigned the site for better user experience, and reduced the number of URLs sent to Google.
This helped restore some of the traffic, but it's still too early to predict if Google will fully recover the traffic.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
