A marketplace with 400,000 URLs, a tiny team and one very long backlog. Here is the order they fixed it in.
Halcyon had 400,000 URLs and fewer than half of them were indexed. Their team of two could not fix everything, so they fixed the right things in the right order.
Week one: stop the bleeding
Canonicals on filter pages removed 180,000 near-duplicates from the crawl in a single release.
Weeks two to six
- Pagination rebuilt on one pattern
- Sitemaps split by type and freshness
- Orphan listings linked from category pages
We stopped arguing about what to do next. The backlog told us.
Takeaways
Rank fixes by pages affected, not by how bad they sound. Template fixes first, single pages last.
