Inside TechTarget's Massive SEO Cleanup: The Case Study You've Never Heard (with Jenny Waggenheim) | Ep. 29

Performance SEO Unpacked with Ruchi Pardal brings a real-world case study: a previously successful search program collapses overnight—a 25% drop with 90% of traffic from organic. No splashy trend report—the playbook is patience and the messy work most SEOs avoid. Guest Jenny Waggenheim walks through late 2019 when a massive site with 50-something subdomains and thousands of index pages hit a wall. Signals pointed to old content, page speed, and a registration process—fixed to second click so Google always saw content the way users did. The team cut about 80% of the content (hundreds of thousands of pages), cleaned up index pages, and consolidated subdomains to sub-folders—site by site over 18 months. Hidden wins included topical authority, better crawl bandwidth, pillars that brought in millions of organic page views and thousands of new members, and finally 200% growth year over year, the highest traffic ever. The takeaway: slow down, do a full audit, seek outside help, and build a better site.

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Jenny Waggenheim is a seasonal SEO and content strategist with over 19 years of experience, working at Tech Target—built the SEO function from scratch and rose to vice president of SEO. She led strategy of B2B tech sites driving 205% year on year growth, from AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity and securing visibility in 180K+ Google AI Overviews. Jenny spearheaded multi-domain migrations, evergreen pillar frameworks, and AI-assisted content workflows. Now channeling her expertise into consulting, she helps B2B brands future proof their SEO strategies.

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• The moment everything changed: a 25% drop overnight with no core update, six weeks after quality rater guidelines changed.
• Three key areas: registration (moved to second click), page speed (testing tools/code), and site architecture & content.
• Index bloat cleanup: thousands of index pages across 50-something sites, pagination, and “so many ways” to the same place—narrow it down.
• Content rules: start with older than five years, zero page views in a year, then < 30 page views a month—unpublish, redirect to something more current, or 404 when irrelevant.
• Crawl bandwidth reality: Google wasn’t seeing the new really valuable content because it was caught up in old content.
• Editorial partnership & buy-in: why writers don’t want content to go away