The problem
CarbonTV streams hunting, fishing and outdoor shows. When I joined the project, the site's index was full of pages that should never have been there and organic clicks were sliding.
The first Screaming Frog crawl turned up 9,799 low-performing pages and 5,871 pages that had no business being indexed. Many were generated by the site's own search box, with URLs like /search?term=….
- 18,131 redirects and 3,332 URLs with no response
- 883 duplicate titles and meta descriptions
- 12,495 duplicate H1s and 12,492 pages missing H2s
- 673 images missing alt attributes
- Only 277 posts on blog.carbontv.com
What I did
- Pulled the junk URLs out of the index so Google spent its crawl budget on real show and channel pages.
- Worked with CarbonTV's developers to clear the technical issues as they shipped, one batch at a time.
- Led the team that rewrote titles and meta descriptions on 9,550 URLs. That took close to two months.
- Mined Search Console for hunting, fishing and outdoor queries, checked the ranking pages for each, then briefed blog posts that answered them.
- Built micro-niche content for hunting equipment and camping equipment on a Web 2.0 property.
- Ran niche outreach to outdoor sites and forums for links, and tracked brand mentions.
I watched hundreds of the site's videos so the written content linked to the right shows.
The results
Monthly organic clicks in Search Console went from 5.57K in April and 5.16K in May to 6K in June, 7.06K in July and 11.3K in August 2023, then 8.48K in September. CTR reached 4% by September.
The trade-off
Removing the internal-search URLs also stripped out a lot of spammy backlinks pointing at them. Total backlinks fell from 819,292 to 352,003 and Moz DA dipped from 44 to 42. Referring domains still rose from 1,712 to 1,745, and Trust Flow went up from 27 to 31. Fewer, cleaner links was the right call.
Team credit: the metadata rewrite was done by my team at Qult Technologies and the technical fixes were shipped by CarbonTV's developers. I planned the strategy and led the work.
