12 million URL problem
The indexed footprint was hundreds of times larger than the real product catalogue.
Unindexed URLs12M → <200K
Engagement~5 years
Commercial termsTop 1–3
PlatformLaravel
00 Executive summary
In early 2020, RojaShop faced roughly 12 million unindexed URLs for about 20,000 products. Uncontrolled filter combinations were consuming crawl resources and obscuring the pages that could drive revenue.
Smartcognis led a direct strategic SEO programme: pruning URL waste, redesigning category architecture and separating useful user filters from indexable landing pages. Over roughly five years, RojaShop became a major online beauty retailer and reached top positions for high-intent fragrance and cosmetics searches.
01 The challenge
Millions of paths were competing with the products that mattered.
A Laravel storefront generated URL combinations for brand, product type, colour, volume, gender, price, skin type, fragrance and stock. The result was crawl waste, diluted internal authority and no clear route from search demand to commercial pages.
Combinatorial duplication
Useful UX filters were allowed to become uncontrolled crawlable URLs.
Weak commercial focus
Organic visibility was not concentrated around categories, brands and products with demand.
02 The solution
Prune aggressively, then rebuild around intent.
The programme treated crawl budget and internal authority as finite resources. We mapped URL combinations, removed low-value paths, redesigned category hierarchy and created only the landing pages with defensible search and commercial intent.
Control URL sprawl
A phased five-month clean-up reduced unindexed URLs by more than 98%.
Rebuild categories
Architecture was aligned with market language, product taxonomy and search behaviour.
Strengthen money pages
Internal links and indexation were concentrated on valuable categories, brands and products.
03 Results
A cleaner index and stronger commercial visibility.
By separating user experience from SEO landing-page logic, RojaShop could scale its catalogue without scaling noise. High-intent searches such as men’s perfume, women’s perfume, powder and lipstick reached top positions.
| Signal | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Unindexed URLs | ~12,000,000 | <200,000 |
| Products | ~20,000 | Structured catalogue |
| Filter logic | Unlimited combinations | Controlled indexation |
| Organic role | Limited revenue | Major acquisition channel |
04 Timeline
05 Business impact
SEO became a scalable commercial capability.
The work moved RojaShop from technical overload to a dependable organic acquisition channel, while the organisation matured enough to build and operate an internal SEO team.
URL efficiency98%+
REDUCTION
REDUCTION
Unindexed URLs fell from roughly 12 million to under 200,000.
Commercial visibilityTOP
1–3
1–3
Important fragrance and cosmetics queries reached leading positions.
OrganisationIN-HOUSE
SEO
SEO
The business developed the capability to continue SEO internally.