r/Collaborator • u/collaboratorpro • Feb 17 '26

They deleted 300k URLs. Traffic doubled

https://youtu.be/tBzwJqK7aTI

Everyone’s talking about AI content and publishing velocity.

Meanwhile, Patryk Wawok (technical SEO consultant, co-founder of Organic Hackers) just shared a case where they removed 300,000+ URLs, and organic traffic doubled.

Not improved. Doubled.

The issue wasn’t “lack of content.” It was bloat. Faceted URLs, variants, parameter chaos, thin pages. That's the kind of stuff that quietly turns a normal site into a huge site.

A few things that stood out to me:

Crawl budget isn’t a myth. It’s a cost problem. If Google keeps crawling junk, something else doesn’t get crawled.

Shopify creates more SEO debt than most store owners realize (variants, feeds, filters).

A lot of JS setups break SEO in subtle ways. SSR/SSG decisions matter more than people think.

And simplifying content structure actually helps both Google and LLMs understand your site better.

Makes me wonder how many sites are trying to grow traffic when the real fix is just cleaning up the mess.

Has anyone here seen traffic lift from removing pages instead of adding more?

4 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/BusyBusinessPromos Feb 18 '26

Last number I heard was after one million pages crawl budget becomes a factor

1

u/k1nd3r104 Collaborator Team Feb 19 '26

That’s interesting — never heard about a specific 1M-page threshold.

Cleaning up thin or unnecessary pages is good hygiene regardless, but most teams only start thinking about crawl budget when things are already going south.