When this project landed on my desk, the site had grown for years without a plan. Google had found more than 120,000 URLs — three times the number of real pages. Most of the important ones were buried, and new articles took weeks to show up in search.
This is how we fixed it, in the order we did it.
1. Start with the audit
Before changing anything, I crawled the full site and matched it against Search Console and server logs. Three things stood out right away:
- Filter and sort parameters created thousands of near-duplicate pages.
- Old category pages redirected in chains of four or five hops.
- The XML sitemap listed pages that no longer existed.
2. Fix what matters first
Not every issue is worth the same effort. We ranked each fix by how many pages it touched and how hard it was to ship, then worked from the top down.
Quick tip
If a fix is cheap and touches every page — like a canonical tag in a shared template — do it first. It often does more than a month of content work.
3. Clean up the content
With the technical base fixed, we merged thin pages that competed for the same searches, and gave each remaining page one clear job.
“Fewer, better pages beat more pages almost every time.”
4. What changed
Six months later, indexed URLs had dropped to match the real page count, new articles were showing up in days instead of weeks, and organic visits had grown steadily month over month.
None of it was magic. It was a careful audit, honest priorities and patient follow-through.