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Fotocasa ranks as one of the largest real estate platforms in Spain, boasting nearly 6 million monthly organic visits as per Sistrix data. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in the website’s positioning and stands as one of the primary attribution channels. Nevertheless, in 2021, the portal began grappling with a decline in website visits and a dip in online visibility.
To address this issue, Adevinta team developed and implemented an SEO strategy that involved reduction of the website size, which resulted in significant improvements in organic traffic.
The strategy implemented
The first step in the strategy was to perform a thorough SEO audit of the Fotocasa website. This helped to identify the main SEO pain points. In particular, It was discovered that a big percentage of the indexed pages received no traffic from organic channels, while consuming Google crawl budget.
It has been decided to reduce the number of the crawlable links across the website in order to facilitate crawling and indexing of the most important transactional pages (for example, “buy apartments in Barcelona”, “rent apartments in Madrid” etc.).
The next step in the strategy was to discover the patterns in the pages with zero organic value. The new research discovered the following schemes:
- Property pages
It has been discovered that the product cards are usually active for a limited time, and they get deactivated by the time they get indexed by Google. - Pagination pages
Crawlable pagination would facilitate access for Googlebot to all the property pages available. If we decide to block crawling of the cards, there is no need to have crawlable pagination links. - Local agency pages
It has been discovered that the website architecture was created in a way that every real estate agency registered on Fotocasa website, had separate URLs for the Spain, provinces, every municipality and each district inside the municipality, For example, there would be
In order to block these pages, it’s been decided to use different solutions, such as implementing the parameter “?from=list” for property links and blocking it through robots.txt. We also used robots.txt “disallow” to stop pagination pages from being crawled and converted local agency links into buttons that couldn’t be crawled by Google.
The results we received
By implementing these strategies, we reduced the number of crawled pages 10 times. This helped to facilitate crawling and indexing of the most important transactional pages on the website.
The strategy paid off, with the organic visibility of the Fotocasa website increasing by 48% since the beginning of the campaign, according to Sistrix. It has also helped to revert the negative non-brand trend by February 2023. Additionally, the number of keywords for which Fotocasa is positioned in Google has almost doubled, according to SEMRush.
The campaign for Fotocasa is an example of how reducing the size of a website can increase organic traffic and online visibility. It shows the importance of controlled indexing and highlights that fewer relevant pages can be more beneficial than millions of irrelevant ones. This campaign is a success story of doing SEO at scale, and it demonstrates that even the biggest websites can benefit from a thorough SEO audit and some strategic tweaking.
Celebrating Our Nomination for the European Search Awards
Our dedicated team has been tirelessly addressing the challenges faced in the industry. Through the investment of significant mental and physical resources, we have devised innovative solutions and strategies for implementation. Being selected as finalists for the prestigious European Search Awards signifies not only internal appreciation, but also external recognition of our team’s collective efforts.
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