Background
HomeGalleryStores.com reached out to Bruce Clay after the website experienced a sudden, major drop in rankings and traffic.
Before the drop, the national online furniture business consistently ranked on the first page of Google Search results for many of its keywords; however, shortly after the launch of a newly designed website, the company noticed a drop in keyword ranking and a significant reduction in traffic in Google.
Bruce Clay took the challenge, identified the primary cause of the problem as a bloated index, and came up with a strategy to reduce the number of indexed pages and bring back the site’s organic traffic from Google.
Objective: Increase organic traffic from Google by addressing issues related to a bloated index.
Strategy
Diagnosis: HomeGalleryStores.com — an ecommerce business that offers home, office, and outdoor furniture and accessories — launched a newly designed website.
Prior to the launch, the website was performing well with an average of over 7,900 average organic visits per day during the six months prior. During this time many of the client’s top keywords regularly ranked on the first page of Google search results.
For example, nearly 20 percent of their top keywords ranked in the first 10 search results (first page) in Google. But only a few months after the launch of the new site, the website experienced a major drop in rankings and traffic.
Daily sessions dropped to an alarming low of 5,266 average daily sessions during Month 3 after the redesign, and by Month 4, many of the client’s top keywords fell four to 10 positions, pushing a few to the second page of Google search results.
HomeGalleryStores.com experienced over 1,200 net position drops for its tracked key phrases.
Our SEO analysts went to work to uncover the reasons behind the sudden loss in rankings and traffic. First, while examining the client’s account in Google Search Console they noticed an abnormally high number of pages indexed in Google. A snapshot in September revealed 2,619,654 indexed pages.

