A regulated London property finance advisory firm had been invisible on Google for seven years. Their WordPress install was compromised and used as a doorway farm — roughly 45,000 hacked URLs in Google's index. Organic performance had dropped to about 100 impressions a day; branded queries barely surfaced and service pages ranked nowhere.
- 01
Pattern-based 410 cleanup
Log analysis, URL pattern identification, and Apache-level 410 Gone rules cleared ~95% of the hacked footprint faster than 404 alone — reclaiming crawl budget.
- 02
Sitemap engineering
Rebuilt XML sitemaps capped at 200 URLs per file, segmented by content type for freshness signalling and topical clarity.
- 03
Semantic content rebuild
Entity front-loading, semantic triplets, E-E-A-T structure, and pages built around real borrower problems — not keyword stuffing.
- 04
Manual SERP keyword strategy
SERP-by-SERP analysis to target queries without AI Overviews and with sparse, low-authority competition — no LLM-generated keyword lists.
- —73,700 total impressions and 1,210 clicks in the last six months.
- —+57% impressions and +17% clicks growth in the last three months.
- —Hacked URLs in index reduced from ~45,000 to 2,550; 118 legitimate URLs indexed.
- —First measurable lift roughly six weeks after the 410 cleanup began.
← Back to all case studies“Fix the crawl signal before anything else — use 410, not 404, for pattern-based removal at scale.”