How I ruined my website's SEO in three simple steps:

A year ago I built a list of winery hotels using a simple website builder. The website reached around 2k visitors a month and had growing impressions chart and indexed pages on Google Search Console.

At this point I decided to turn the website into NextJS app in order to translate it in a booking platform. Here's what I did next.

Step 1.
While working on the new version I decided to change the path to my listings (nooo 🫨). On the initial version I had listed all the winery hotels under a "hotels" category, but building a new version I decided to change it to "wineries". Don't ask me, why

Step 2.
Then I decided to shorten descriptions for hotels and make them unified across all the hotels, and basically made them "not unique" and generic, "to make it easy to read for users".

Step 3.
I built the catalog with client-side JavaScript, which meant Google's crawler couldn't see the hotel links at all. Only 24 out of 300+ are visible for bots.

In the end I got dramatic declining on impressions and clicks. It dropped 10 times from 2k-4k impressions and ~14 clicks a day, to ~250 impressions with 1-2 clicks, and ~70% crawled/not indexed pages.

That's what happens, when you have no idea, how SEO works.

How I try to solve it.

1. About the path issue. I lost the momentum and the new path already crawled, so here I'm just waiting.

2. I improved copy generating process and added more resources to crawl (directories, reviews and official website) to make descriptions more unique and rich.

3. I kept the JS catalog, but added extra page with links to all the winery hotels with linking from the main page.

4. Added breadcrumbs to make more internal links.

5. Placed blog's articles on the main and countries/regions pages to make even more internal links

6. Added countries/regions section to the main page to make more and more internal links.

And now I'm waiting how it will show up in my GSC stats...

Turns out SEO is less about tricks and more about not breaking the basics.
Has anyone else survived an SEO self-sabotage? What worked for you?

Alex Osso

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