Kicking The Side of The SEO TV Set

Often with technical SEO, there is no black and white answer to a problem. You often have to rely on previous experiences, and mostly intuition. It reminds me of when I was a kid and the TV was on the fritz. When all else failed, sometimes kicking the side of the TV set improved your reception.

I was thinking about this because early last year, an AI startup had to kill a substantial number of pages on its site due to legal reasons (guess they couldn’t afford OpenAI’s lawyers). These pages got a lot of non-brand organic Google traffic. Guess what happened when they killed them:

A >50% drop. Yikes, indeed.

Even worse, their non-brand clicks started to decline:
That’s when they brought LSG in. We started working on improving the situation, but soon after, they accidentally indexed a subdomain that was substantially a duplicate of its entire www site. And lost another 50% of Google clicks.

It shouldn’t have mattered much as the subdomain URLs canonicalized to their www versions. But almost immediately, Google started ignoring the canonicals and began canonicalizing the www URLs to their subdomain versions. To make matters worse, the subdomain URLs weren’t set up for conversion. Conversions dropped like a rock.

This is where we decided to kick the side of the TV set. We thought it would be best to remove the subdomain URLs via Google Search Console’s Removal tool. But we weren’t confident it would work. Since Google was canonicalizing the www URLs to the subdomain URLs, we were concerned removing them would tank traffic even further. Even though we were fairly certain at some point the www URLs would recover, we had no idea how long it would take Google to figure it out. But we didn’t think we had any better options.

So we requested removal of the subdomain URLs and immediately the site tanked again. But a few days later it started to recover, and came back:

This appears to have done the trick. Not only did non-brand clicks recover, but impressions bounced back virtually to where they were before they killed the old pages last year. This was a good sign that the site had started to rank for a lot more queries than before the indexing of the subdomain.

Then it occurred to me that we were not looking at apples to apples. By keeping the old URLs in the graph, we were measuring performance versus a state that no longer existed (due to the removal of the legally-questionable pages). So I created a fairly giant regex (963 patterns), popped into Google Search Console, prayed, and hit submit:

Now we had a good idea of how non-brand Google traffic was performing without the dead pages. And, IMO, it looks pretty damn good. The www URLs recovered some of the old URLs’ traffic over the months following their removal. Before the subdomain got indexed, our SEO efforts were starting to push the traffic up. Once we removed the subdomain, the traffic is starting to grow again in the right direction.

So remember, when you find yourself in a tricky SEO situation and you’re not sure what to do, try kicking the side of the set.