The starting point

The client runs a subscription video network for hunting, fishing and outdoor shows, with a main site of show, episode, clip and live-cam pages and a separate blog. Every episode has its own URL, so the site had grown to tens of thousands of pages, and many of them weren’t earning any search traffic.

Our April 2023 audit found 9,799 low-performing pages and 5,871 URLs that shouldn’t have been in Google’s index at all, many of them generated by the site’s internal search. The crawl also showed 3,332 URLs with no response, 18,131 redirects, 298 broken pages, 883 duplicate titles and descriptions, and more than 12,000 pages with duplicate H1 headings. The blog had only 277 posts to support the shows.

Search Console showed 5.16K clicks in May 2023 from 176K impressions. The backlink profile looked large on paper, but one external forum alone accounted for more than 516,000 nofollow links, most of them pointing at those internal search pages.

What we did

  1. Stopped the crawl waste We mapped the junk URL patterns, including internal search results, dead cams and broken playlists, and worked with the client’s developers to keep them out of the index so Google spent its time on real show and episode pages.
  2. Fixed the technical errors We exported the broken pages, server errors, redirect chains and no-response URLs with the pages linking to them, and handed the development team fix lists they could work through in batches.
  3. Rewrote titles and descriptions at scale We wrote new titles and meta descriptions for 9,550 show, episode and clip URLs, built around what people actually search for, such as the show name, species and location. It took about two months.
  4. Cleaned up the link profile We reviewed the spammy links tied to the internal search pages and built a disavow list, while outreach went to niche hunting and fishing sites and forums.
  5. Added supporting content Writers produced blog posts on fishing lakes, hunting seasons and gear that linked back to related shows, plus posts for social channels and a company-owned micro-blog.

Delivered

  • Full technical audit of the main site and the blog
  • New titles and meta descriptions for 9,550 URLs
  • Fix lists for 404s, 500 errors, redirects and no-response URLs
  • Disavow file for the spam link profile
  • Keyword research from Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush and Ubersuggest
  • New blog posts, guest posts and social media posts
  • Progress reports every two weeks for both sites

What changed

Monthly Google Search clicks went from 5.16K in May to 6K in June, 7.06K in July and 11.3K in August, then settled at 8.48K in September 2023. Impressions held between 168K and 250K a month over the same period, so the gain came mostly from more people clicking, not just more people seeing the listings.

The cleanup cut total backlinks from about 819K to 352K, while referring domains rose slightly from 1,712 to 1,745. Majestic Trust Flow went from 27 to 31 and Citation Flow from 37 to 40.

What we’d point out

August’s 11.3K includes a one-day spike in late August, so we treat September’s 8.48K as the cleaner comparison against May. That’s still about 64% more clicks a month.

Removing hundreds of thousands of spam links had a cost: Moz Domain Authority slipped from 44 to 42. We’d make the same call again, because those links pointed at pages Google shouldn’t index and pulled in the wrong keywords. If you run a large catalog site, our SEO services start the same way, with a crawl of what Google is really spending its time on.