How Indexing Pages in GSC Helped Achieve a 443% Increase in Top 3 Keyword Phrases

Our analysis revealed significant issues related to URL and content duplication, negatively affecting the site’s visibility in search engines.

As part of our cooperation with HEGO’S, a renowned footwear brand operating in the Polish market since 2003, we conducted a detailed audit of the hegos.eu website. This analysis revealed significant issues related to URL and content duplication, negatively affecting the site’s visibility in search engines. In response, we prioritized blocking Googlebot access to non-valuable pages and managing crawl budget. Additionally, we focused on increasing organic traffic and optimizing the site’s usability to maximize its potential and improve accessibility for indexing robots and users.

The first actions we took included a thorough analysis of indexing, which detected errors related to repeating product filters due to the complex structure of the site. Due to the site’s construction and incomplete technical documentation, close cooperation with developers was necessary, supported by solutions based on:

• PHP
• JavaScript
• The application of .htaccess rules and regular expressions (Regular Expressions).

These issues significantly impacted two key areas:

• A problem causing the site to return a 200 server response code for any subdomain (e.g., shop.hegos.eu, ww.hegos.eu, xyz.hegos.eu), resulting in the generation of unlimited duplicates across the entire site structure.

• Errors related to indexed filters in categories where addresses with parameters were presented as regular <a href> links in the site structure.

These challenges led to the generation of 2 million site issue notifications in Google Search Console.

details

A full plan to gain visibility

The solutions implemented for optimizing the hegos.eu site included several essential actions to improve management, structure, and functionality. Below are the detailed changes we introduced:

• By improving server configuration, the possibility of creating new subdomains was limited, thereby enhancing control over the website’s URL structure.

• Redirecting known subdomains by introducing appropriate redirects for existing subdomains to the main domain hegos.eu, facilitating clear brand identification and improving address consistency.

• Hiding indexed filters by changing HTML elements from <a href> to <button> and using the JavaScript location.href function in the onclick event, effectively hiding indexed filters and providing better indexing control by search engines.

• Optimizing the sitemap structure by improving the sitemap files’ structure, limiting to canonical addresses, dividing sitemaps into three sections: blog, categories, and products, with each sitemap file containing a maximum of 50,000 URLs. All sitemaps were placed in a sitemap index, according to Google’s guidelines.

• Improving metadata across the site, adapting to current standards, and optimizing for keywords.

• Adding unique content, positively affecting indexing by search engines and increasing site attractiveness.

• Enhancing breadcrumbs menu generation, contributing to better site navigation.

• Removing empty categories from sidebars and the main menu, eliminating unnecessary elements and facilitating user navigation.

Dividing categories into subcategories, reorganizing the category structure to match keyword intent, facilitating user search for information and products.

Innovative strategies

Applying innovative strategies, effective collaboration between technical and content teams, and close coordination with the brand resulted in a significant increase in page indexing. Successfully excluding irrelevant pages from Googlebot indexing positively influenced Google’s site assessment, improving its positioning in search results. Additionally, improved site navigation significantly increased user engagement and satisfaction.

Source: Senuto

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All these steps are excellent proof of how focused work can lead to significant growth for a brand. Attention to detail and a holistic approach to the problem can effectively translate into success in the dynamically changing SEO industry.