Morenov Property
Estate agency & listings site · Varna
8 months · Signal
How a Varna agency stopped 40,000 dead listings from drowning its live ones
−85%
crawl waste
Share of Googlebot requests spent on dead or duplicate URLs, 71% → 11% (modelled)
01 · The challenge
A lighthouse pointed at the wrecks
Expired listings stayed indexed forever and faceted search created endless URL variants, so Googlebot rarely reached new properties.
Morenov lists homes from Briz to Vinitsa. A good flat with a sea view is often under offer within a fortnight — so a listing that takes nineteen days to be crawled is a listing that never ranks while it matters.
Seven years of sold and withdrawn properties had piled up as indexed pages, and every filter combination on the search page minted a fresh URL. Googlebot spent its visits charting the wrecks instead of the harbour.
Before · month 0
41,800 URLs indexed
- Live listings 3,100
- Facet & filter variants 4,500
- Expired listings 34,200
After · month 8
6,200 URLs indexed
- Live listings 3,400
- District & bedroom hubs 2,100
- Guides, agents & other 700
02 · Diagnosis
Soundings from the audit
- 01 · TechnicalCritical
Expired listings return 200 OK
34,200 sold or withdrawn properties still indexed as thin pages; 6,800 flagged as soft-404 in Search Console.
- 02 · TechnicalCritical
Infinite faceted URLs
Sort, price slider and map-bounds parameters combine into an effectively unbounded URL space, all internally linked and crawlable.
- 03 · TechnicalHigh
Canonicals point at themselves
Up to 14 variants per property, each declaring itself canonical, so Google picks a version at random — often the print view.
- 04 · PerformanceHigh
Mobile LCP 4.8s
Uncompressed carousel and a blocking map script push the price and photo below a 2.5s threshold on 4G.
- 05 · LocalMedium
No district landing pages
Searchers look for Briz, Chayka, Levski and Vinitsa by name; the site answered only with filter results that changed hourly.
- 06 · ContentMedium
Listing copy duplicated from portals
Descriptions were pasted to three national portals first, so the agency's own page was rarely the version chosen to rank.
03 · The strategy
Four contacts on the scope
Built on our Signal plan: fix what search engines can reach before writing a single new page. Each tactic below was one contact on the scope — select one to see what we found and what changed.
Contact 01 · bearing 038°
Crawl budget
- Found
- Log files showed 71% of Googlebot requests landing on faceted filter URLs and expired listings. New listings waited a median 19 days for a first crawl.
- Fixed
- Disallowed sort/price-range parameters in robots.txt, removed crawlable links to infinite facet combinations, and split the XML sitemap into a live-listings feed that updates hourly with accurate lastmod.
Bot hits on waste
71%to11%
Time to first crawl
19 daysto1.4 days
04 · Ship's log
8 months, watch by watch
Month 0140,900 idx
Survey
Six weeks of server logs parsed; every Googlebot hit classified as live, dead, facet or asset. Baseline: 71% waste.
Month 0233,400 idx
Charting the URL space
Parameter inventory, canonical rules agreed with the listings developer, 410/301 policy signed off by the sales team.
Month 0324,100 idx
Dead listings sink
410s on 22,000 long-sold URLs, 301s for withdrawn homes, “recently sold” template with similar live properties.
Month 0415,800 idx
Facets fenced
robots.txt rules for sort and price params, filter links moved to buttons, demand-backed district + bedroom hubs launched.
Month 0510,900 idx
Speed pass
AVIF hero images, lazy carousel, interaction-loaded map, server-rendered price block. LCP crosses 2.5s.
Month 068,200 idx
Fresh-listing feed
Hourly live sitemap with true lastmod and Indexing-friendly internal links from district hubs to newest homes.
Month 076,900 idx
Own the copy
Listings now publish on the agency site 48h before portals, with unique district notes and floor plans.
Month 086,200 idx
Steady light
Monitoring: weekly log diff, soft-404 alerts and an LCP budget in CI. Index settles at 6,200 healthy URLs.
Bar: share of crawl spent on useful URLs that month.
05 · Results
Clear water, lit harbour
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
41,800to6,200
4.8sto2.1s
54to131
Rankings, month 0 → 8
| Keyword | Vol/mo | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| apartments for sale varna | 2,900 | 34 | 6 |
| sea view apartment varna | 880 | 41 | 4 |
| 2 bedroom flat briz | 320 | 58 | 3 |
| chayka apartments for sale | 260 | — | 2 |
| house for sale vinitsa | 390 | 47 | 5 |
| new build varna levski | 210 | 63 | 7 |
| estate agent varna | 1,300 | 22 | 8 |
The same search, two tides
“2 bedroom flat briz” · mock-up
Before
morenov.bg › print › listing-88214?sort=price_asc
SOLD – No longer available | Morenov Property
This property is no longer available. Please browse our other listings…
After
morenov.bg › varna › briz › 2-bedroom
2-Bedroom Flats for Sale in Briz, Varna — 38 live homes
From €118,000 · sea-view options · listed this week · floor plans and district guide.
Your site, swept
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