This is Week 3 of my rebuild-in-public series. Week 1, I de-indexed 1,300 pages from my website in a move that made several people question my sanity including, briefly, me. Week 2, my email open rate crashed to 11% because the entire email industry changed its rules and forgot to tell anyone. I got it back to 46%.

This week, I went deeper into the SEO rabbit hole. Five separate technical tasks, none of them exciting, all of them necessary, and every single one of them the kind of thing that sits on the to-do list for years because nothing is visibly broken until, one day, everything is.

If you’ve ever looked at your Google Search Console and felt a vague sense of dread without knowing exactly why, this blog post is for you. I’m going through everything I tackled this week, why I did it, and exactly how you can do the same thing on your own site. Step by step. No glossing over the boring bits.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about SEO recovery, it’s 90% plumbing. And the plumbing has to be right before any of the interesting stuff works.

First, the context, what I was actually looking at

After the de-indexing work in Week 1, I opened Google Search Console and properly looked at the data for the first time in too long. What I found was, politely, a mess.

• 94 pages returning 404 (not found) — dead pages Google was still trying to crawl
• 1,110 pages with redirect issues — many of them redirect chains, where A goes to B goes to C, bleeding authority along the way
• 1,219 pages Google crawled but chose not to index — pages Google looked at and essentially said no thanks
• Hundreds of tag pages with one or two posts on them, diluting my topical focus
• Broken internal links scattered across 2,000+ posts, pointing to pages that no longer exist

None of this happened overnight. This is a decade of content accumulation, platform changes, and if I’m being honest not paying close enough attention. The site had grown into something sprawling and confused. Google was confused. I was confused. It needed sorting out.

Task 1 – Tag Page No Index 

Why it matters: Tag pages are archive pages WordPress creates automatically  /tag/social-media/, /tag/email-marketing/, and so on. On a site with thousands of posts and years of tagging, you end up with hundreds of these. Many have only one or two posts. They’re thin, often duplicative of category pages, and Google sometimes chooses them as the canonical URL instead of your actual content. That last one is particularly maddening.

How to do it

Step 1: Export every tag from WordPress. Go to Posts → Tags in the WordPress admin, which shows tag name and post count. Or use this database query:

Step 2: Apply a clear rule: fewer than 5 posts = noindex. 5 or more posts = keep. No judgment calls.

Step 3: Implement with a code snippet rather than going through each tag manually. Add this to a must-use plugin file in wp-content/mu-plugins/:

This works automatically going forward any new tag with fewer than 5 posts gets noindexed without you having to touch anything.

Step 4: Verify. Open three or four low-count tag pages in incognito, view source, and search for ‘noindex’ in the page code. It should be there. Then check a high-count tag page and confirm it’s NOT there.

Worth noting: This is the same pattern as the Week 1 Tips category noindex, same approach, different target. Once you understand the logic, you can apply it to any type of thin archive page

Task 2 – 404 Recovery and Redirect Mapping

Why it matters: GSC was showing 94 pages returning 404. Some of those pages have external backlinks pointing at them, other websites linking to a URL that now goes nowhere. Every one of those is wasted authority. A backlink hitting a 404 is like someone sending you a letter with the wrong address. The goodwill is there. It’s just not reaching you.

How to do it

Step 1: Export the 404 list. Go to Google Search Console → Indexing → Pages → Not Found (404) and export the full list.

Step 2: Cross-reference with your external links. In GSC, go to Links → External Links → Top Linked Pages and export that list. In a spreadsheet, use VLOOKUP to match them. For each 404 URL: does it have external backlinks? If yes, how many linking domains? The ones with backlinks are worth fixing. The ones without can safely stay as 404s.

Step 3: Find redirect targets for each 404 URL that HAS backlinks. Look at the URL slug — what was the page about? Search the live site using Google: site:yourdomain.com [topic]. Find the closest matching live page. If there’s no match, redirect to the relevant category page or homepage.

Step 4: Implement 301 redirects. I use the Redirection plugin in WordPress (already installed, don’t add new plugins unnecessarily). Every redirect must be a 301 (permanent) and must go directly to the final destination. No chains. A → C, not A → B → C.

Step 5: Test five redirected URLs in incognito and confirm they land on the right page.

Task 3 – Redirect Chain Cleanup

Why it matters: GSC was showing 1,110 pages with redirects. Most are fine, a single clean 301 redirect is normal. The problem is redirect chains, page A redirects to page B, which redirects to page C. Every hop loses a little link equity. It also wastes crawl budget, because Google has to follow the chain rather than landing directly on the live page.

How to do it

Step 1: Export the redirect list from GSC: Indexing → Pages → Page with redirect.

Step 2: Crawl through the list with Screaming Frog. The free version handles up to 500 URLs — work in batches if your list is longer. For each redirect URL, categorise as:

• Clean — resolves in one hop to a live page
• Chain — goes through 2 or more redirects
• Broken — ends at a 404 or error

Step 3: Fix the chains. Update the first URL to point directly to the final destination, skip the middle. For broken redirects, find the closest matching live page and update the target.

Step 4: Verify five fixed redirects in a browser and confirm they resolve in one hop.

Worth noting: This isn’t deleting old content or removing redirects that are working fine. It’s purely making existing redirects more efficient. A single clean redirect is useful. A chain of three is friction.

Task 4 – Crawled, Not Indexed Audit

Why it matters: GSC was showing 1,219 pages that Google had crawled but chosen not to index. These are pages Google looked at, decided weren’t worth showing in search results, and moved on. Understanding what those pages are and why  is essential for knowing what to fix next. This one was audit only, gather the data, make decisions later.

How to do it

Step 1: Export the list from GSC: Indexing → Pages → Crawled – currently not indexed.

Step 2: Categorise every URL by pattern. Sort the spreadsheet alphabetically and batch-categorise:

• Contains /tag/ → Tag page
• Contains /category/ → Category page
• Contains /page/ → Pagination
• In Tips category → Guest post (already handled)
• Everything else → Core content (needs manual review)

Step 3: Build a summary count. How many of each type? This tells you immediately where the biggest opportunities are.

Step 4: Create a separate tab for core content URLs only, the actual blog posts Google has rejected. For each one, note the post title, category, and publish date. These are the posts you need to review: update, merge, noindex, or leave.

What the audit told me. Most of the 1,219 were tag pages, category pages, and pagination, all already being handled. But there was a meaningful chunk of core content in there too. Posts Google looked at and decided weren’t worth indexing. That’s a content quality signal I can’t ignore, and it’s informing my content improvement work going forward.

Task 5 – Broken Internal Link Audit and Fix

Why it matters: With 2,000+ posts on the site and a decade of content, internal links pointing to pages that no longer exist are inevitable. Every broken internal link signals to Google that the site isn’t well-maintained. There was also a specific issue I’d already spotted, malformed URLs on podcast pages where someone had pasted a full URL as a relative link, creating completely broken paths like /podcast/richard-woods-podcast/lilachbullock.com/contact-us/

How to do it

Step 1: Crawl the site with Screaming Frog. Configure it to report internal links returning 404, 410, 5xx errors, and 301/302 redirects (not broken, but should be updated to point directly to the final destination).

Step 2: Build a fix spreadsheet with these columns:

• Source page (the page containing the broken link)
• Broken link URL
• Status code
• Fix type (Update or Remove)
• New URL (if updating)

For each broken link: if 404 or 410, search the site for the closest matching live page. If found: Update. If not found: Remove. If 301 or 302: follow the redirect to the final destination and update the link to point there directly.

Step 3: Review the spreadsheet before touching anything. You want to see what you’re dealing with before making changes.

Step 4: Implement fixes. Update links: change the href to the correct live URL. Remove links: delete the hyperlink but leave the surrounding text completely intact. You are only changing the link — never the content around it.

Step 5: Re-crawl a sample of pages where fixes were made. Confirm no broken internal links remain. Screenshots as proof.

The other half of the week, building the revenue pipeline

The SEO work is the infrastructure. But I’m also, in parallel, building the pipeline that turns that infrastructure into income. Here’s what else happened this week.

Newsletter platform submissions. Getting my newsletter listed on every platform where brands actively search for newsletters to sponsor, Paved, Swapstack, SparkLoop, Passionfroot, and 17 others. These are marketplaces where marketing teams at SaaS companies go when they want to run a newsletter sponsorship. Being listed is free and creates permanent passive inbound enquiries. Twenty-one platforms, profile created or updated on each one.

Newsletter advertiser outreach. I have a list of companies that already pay to advertise in other newsletters. Warm prospects, they don’t need convincing that newsletter sponsorship works, they just need a reason to add mine. This week my task was finding the right contact person at each company, verified email addresses, LinkedIn profiles. The outreach comes next.

PR, media and speaker platform registrations. HARO, PodcastGuests, SpeakerHub, and similar. Platforms where journalists find expert sources, podcast hosts find guests, and event organisers find speakers. One-time setup that creates permanent passive visibility.

Sponsored post directory listings. This is how lilachbullock.com used to generate $7,000 a month in passive income. Brands and SEO agencies search platforms like Authority.builders and similar directories for sites to place sponsored content on. Being listed with accurate stats, domain authority, categories, pricing generates inbound enquiries. Twenty-two platforms this week.

Worth noting: None of this is exciting. All of it is necessary. The principle is the same one I keep coming back to, infrastructure before promotion. Get the plumbing right, get the visibility right, and then push.

What’s actually moving

I want to give you the honest version, not the curated-for-LinkedIn version.

The SEO work is progressing but the results aren’t visible yet. That’s expected, Google doesn’t reward technical cleanup immediately. The guidance is 6–8 weeks from when the changes are in place to seeing meaningful movement in impressions and crawl behaviour. I’m in week 3. I’m tracking it.

The email recovery from Week 2 is holding. My engaged segment open rate is still in the mid-40s. That’s not going back to 11% if I can help it.

The revenue pipeline work is long-game. Getting listed on 21 newsletter sponsor platforms doesn’t produce income this week. It produces inbound enquiries in 4–8 weeks from brands whose marketing teams happen to be searching at that moment. I’m planting seeds, not harvesting.

The honest answer to ‘is it working?’ is, the signals are pointing the right way. Ask me in six weeks.

What’s next

Next week I’m going to look at the ‘crawled, not indexed’ core content list, the actual blog posts Google has looked at and rejected. I need to make decisions on each of those, update them, merge them into stronger posts, or noindex them. That’s going to be its own post, because the decision-making framework for that is worth sharing properly.

I’m also going to share the first data from the Looker Studio dashboard I’ve set up this week, a proper tracking system for SEO, email, and social in one place.

Same approach as every week. Real numbers. What I’m doing and why. No tidying it up.

If you’re doing similar work on your own site and want to compare notes or if you’ve hit a specific issue I haven’t covered, comment and let me know. I read everything.

This is part of my rebuild-in-public series. New post every week at www.lilachbullock.com

If you want to follow along in real time, the wins, the numbers, the weeks where nothing works and I write about it anyway, my newsletter is where it all happens first. Every week, one honest update from the rebuild. No pretending I’ve got it more figured out than I do.