Industry leading technical support brings organic rankings back from the brink
Fast action turns around fortunes in key trading period
Love the Sales is an online marketplace showcasing discounted clothing, home-ware and tech products, helping consumers find sales items across hundreds of popular brands all together in one place.
Featuring more than 1 million sale items, the site makes it easy for millions of visitors to find the best offers using its award-winning machine learning platform.
The challenge
Love the Sales came to us after seeing a crash in their organic search traffic. With a rankings drop of 68% across all devices, they needed immediate action to remedy this issue.
A site dedicated to providing the best deals on high street brands to an online audience lives and dies by its organic search visibility. As such, Love the Sales have an in-house SEO team looking after rankings, product data and content. An acute problem like this, however, called for additional support and a fresh pair of eyes.
When first meeting Builtvisible, they were very open about our problem and how it could be solved. This consultative, demonstrably intelligent approach confirmed to us that these guys were smart and would solve our issue. We set them to the task almost immediately, given they’d blown the other agencies we saw out of the water.
Stuart McClure, CMO, Love The Sales
The solution
Time was of the essence, so we undertook a preliminary investigation before our first meeting with Love the Sales.
Google’s mobile first index was yet to go live and Real-time Penguin factors could not explain such a sharp decline in rankings. Given the spikes reported in SERP monitoring tools and other sites affected at the time, it was clear there were other factors at play.
Our initial suspicions focused on a Core algorithm update as the primary contributing factor, while further analysis revealed the following anomalies:
- A sharp rise in indexed pages following rollout of international architecture appeared to have been artificially inflated with non-canonical URLS.
- Thousands of indexed parameterised URLs were still being crawled & indexed despite rel=canonical being in place, resulting in cannibalised content and wasted search engine crawl budget.
- The current affiliate redirect and JS setup (implemented to deal with the vast amount of affiliate data parsed through the site) was unintentionally presenting a profile to Google similar to cloaking sites.
All of the penalties discovered shared characteristics of Google’s Panda update which is now part of the ‘core’ algorithm. This update penalizes sites for thin, duplicate or ‘low quality’ content.
Our approach as an agency is to tell it like it is, so we were really open with the team at Love the Sales. We showed them the results of our preliminary analysis and gave them a clear idea of the best route forward from the outset. We followed our initial analysis up with a comprehensive log file analysis and technical audit.
Love the Sales Case Study
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The Results
Our team have a strong background in SEO, so we weren’t looking for the usual SEO agency, we wanted a team with demonstrable skills above and beyond our own.
Stuart McClure, CMO, Love The Sales
This was a great project to work on as the client was so responsive. The in-house SEO team fixed the issues we identified in the pitch whilst we were still conducting the audit, which led to an immediate return in traffic.
Tackling the issue together played a crucial part in the quick recovery of their SERPS and has led to an excellent working relationship.