Revitalizing Ad Revenue for a Digital News Publisher
An established digital publisher in the technology niche with millions of articles.
Challenges We Faced
Publishers with massive archives face a unique set of technical and content-related problems:
Extreme Index Bloat
A 15-year-old site with 2 million+ URLs had severe keyword cannibalization and “zombie pages” (no traffic).
Declining Organic Traffic
Ad revenue was dropping as legacy content was losing rankings to newer, fresher, and more topically-focused competitors.
Chaotic Internal Linking
New articles were “orphaned” upon publication, and valuable “link equity” was trapped in old, unlinked articles.
Failure to Rank for “Topics”
The site was built on old-school “keyword” optimization, and Google’s move to “topic clusters” left them behind.
Poor Core Web Vitals (CWV)
A heavy, legacy site design resulted in slow page speed, especially on mobile, which directly hurt rankings.
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Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
AI-Powered Technical & Log File Analysis
Used AI-powered technical crawlers to conduct a massive log file analysis, identifying pages that Google never crawled and pages that received no organic traffic.
Programmatic Content Pruning & Refresh
Used AI to classify all 2M+ URLs as “Keep,” “Refresh,” or “Prune.”
Programmatically 301-redirected or 410-deleted over 750,000 low-value “zombie pages,” massively improving crawl efficiency.
Semantic Topic Clustering
Re-architected the site using a Semantic & Entity SEO model, grouping related articles into new, powerful topic hubs.
Used NLP Content Optimization Tools to refresh and consolidate the top 500 “Keep” articles into new, authoritative, long-form guides.
Automated Internal Linking Strategy
Deployed AI tools to analyze the text of all articles and programmatically insert contextual internal links, connecting orphaned pages and strengthening topic clusters.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Traffic | 10,000/mo | 22,000/mo | +120% |
| Conversion Rate | 1.5% | 3% | +100% |
| Keywords in Top 10 | 80 | 230 | +150 |
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Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- For large publisher sites, don’t be afraid to prune content. Deleting or redirecting low-quality “zombie pages” is often the fastest way to grow.
- Log file analysis is non-negotiable for large sites. You must know what Google is actually crawling.
- Use AI for internal linking at scale to build and reinforce topical authority.
- Focus on Core Web Vitals; for publishers, site speed and user experience are direct ranking factors.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- A bold content pruning strategy that the client trusted us to execute.
- Direct access to the client’s developers to implement technical and CWV fixes.
- Using AI-powered crawlers was the only way to analyze the site’s massive scale (millions of pages).
