How a pharma site got 4x its clicks back after an indexing crash
A US brand site for a prescription baby medicine lost almost all its Google traffic in May 2026. The brand had just been sold, and the site move went wrong. We found the real cause and built the way back.
- ClientUS prescription medicine brand
- NicheHealth (YMYL)
- WorkTechnical audit, recovery plan
- TimeSince May 2026, ongoing
Google Search Console, September vs May 2026
The crash
Traffic fell to near zero after a brand sale
The brand was bought by a new company. During the site move, Google dropped indexed pages from 203 to 66. Daily clicks fell from about 70 to almost 0.
For a health site this is serious. Google holds drug and medical pages to its strictest trust standards (YMYL), so every fix had to be careful and correct.
The diagnosis
What the audit found
It wasn’t a penalty. It was a post-sale indexing collapse, made worse by old problems nobody had cleaned up.
Migration collapse
Indexed pages fell from 203 to 66 after the ownership change.
Old hack still indexed
Thousands of spam URLs from a past hack were wasting crawl budget.
Redirect conflict
The www and non-www versions of the site were competing with each other.
Old owner still named
The previous company was still on contact and legal pages, a trust risk for a drug site.
Huge CTR gap
283K impressions on the main condition page at a 0.04% click-through rate.
Weak health schema
No Drug or MedicalCondition markup for Google or AI search to read.
What we did
The work behind the numbers
Found the cause
Traced the May drop to a post-acquisition indexing collapse, not a Google penalty.
Recovery plan
Ranked every fix by impact and set KPI baselines to measure against.
Monthly tracking
Checked each fix went live using GSC and crawl data, and reported every month.
Growth roadmap
Next wins mapped: dosing, cost and side effect searches, internal links and health schema.
The results
Back, and still growing
- Clicks: 354 to 1,400 a month (4x)
- Impressions: 30.4K to 106K a month (3.5x)
- “infantile hemangioma” impressions: 669 to 5,747
- Last 3 months: clicks up 42% (2.97K to 4.22K)
- Daily impressions: 174 at the low point to 12.7K at the July peak
- Junk URLs in Google: 6,509 down to 2,700
The takeaway
Find the real cause before you fix anything
Most traffic drops get blamed on Google. This one was a site move gone wrong. A careful audit found it, and a ranked plan brought the traffic back without risking trust on a medical site.
Lost your Google traffic?
Get a free review of your site. We’ll find what caused the drop and the 3 fixes that would bring it back first.