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.

ㅤ

👤 Guest Bio

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.

ㅤ

📌 What We Cover

• 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, the archive constraint, and how explaining the data changed minds.
• Subdomains to sub-folders: start with one, redirect everything, let it sit, then site by site to three sites every other week—18 months total.
• Hidden wins:topical authority, choosing to unpublish definitions that brought tons of traffic but weren’t topically relevant; pillar strategy that kept people on the site and drove revenue.
• Mindset in a mess:slow down, full audit, seek outside help, find case studies, be patient—build a better site.
• What not to do:no quick wins, don’t blindly trust AI, follow E-A-T, unique content with data and expert opinion.

ㅤ

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Google (quality rater guidelines; AI Overviews; Search Console)
• Search Engine Land (article visibility)
• SEMrush
• Reddit
• ChatGPT
• Perplexity
• E-A-T (guidelines)

ㅤ

ResultFirst: Visit for more SEO tips and strategies.

Connect with Ruchi Pardal on LinkedIn for a conversation about SEO.

If you enjoyed today’s episode and found valuable insights for your business, be sure to subscribe to Performance SEO Unpacked for more expert discussions. Don’t forget to leave a review and share this episode with your team or fellow marketers! Let’s keep the conversation going—connect with us on LinkedIn and join the community of enterprise SEO enthusiasts.