How Tech SEO May Have Helped Two Big Sites Grow Traffic

Last updated: December 29, 2022.

Over the past couple of years I've worked with two large web sites that have netted strong traffic gains.

Both sites have hundreds of millions of URLs representing current, former, and non-canonical pages.

Both sites have worked on maintaining good technical quality by:

Aligning internal links, XML sitemaps and canonical links.
Removing unwanted pages (noindex to the extent possible, not found, redirects) from the linkgraph.
XML sitemaps that contain only indexable pages with self-referencing canonical links (linkgraphs can't always be quite that clean as they sometimes have to contain certain noindex pages).

Both sites are strong brands within their respective industries, though hardly household names.

The bigger of the sites (in terms of number of URLs) had a phenomenal 2022:
A very simple graph with a up-and-to-the-right line representing traffic

The smaller site (which actually has a lot more traffic) also did well, outperforming YoY by 15% against historically high traffic:
A very simple graph with two lines that illustrates year-over-year traffic growth.

I don't think the traffic gains were directly caused by the emphasis on good tech SEO hygiene, but I am of the opinion that the strategy positioned the sites to take advantage of changes in the various search results algorithms.