The challenge
Tessellate connected homeowners with vetted tradespeople across 40 trades. They had 41,000 supplier profile pages and had been told by two previous consultants that more pages meant more traffic. Google had indexed 6% of them. The remaining 94% were profiles with a name, a trade, and nothing else — no photos, no description, no completed jobs, no reviews. Crawl budget was being spread across tens of thousands of near-empty URLs, and the genuinely good profiles were being crawled once a quarter.
What we did
Noindexed the thin tail deliberately
We set a completeness threshold — description, service area, at least three completed jobs, and one review — and noindexed every profile below it. That removed 34,000 pages from the indexable set. It was the hardest recommendation to get approved and it is the entire reason the engagement worked.
Made completeness worth something to suppliers
Noindexing alone would have been punitive. We paired it with a visible profile-strength meter and a plain explanation that complete profiles appear in search. Profile completion rose 68% in five months, which moved thousands of pages back above the threshold on their own.
Rebuilt the trade × location matrix
Category pages only ship where genuine supply density supports them. A page for a trade with two suppliers in a region is a bounce and a wasted crawl, so those combinations redirect to the nearest viable parent instead of existing as empty results.
Replaced browsing with structured matching
Homeowners were being asked to evaluate tradespeople themselves. We replaced the directory browse with a structured job brief returning three matched suppliers, which cut time-to-first-quote by 54%.
The result
Organic sessions grew 402% while the indexable page count fell by 83%. Indexation went from 6% to 91%. The counterintuitive part is worth stating plainly: they got substantially more traffic by publishing dramatically fewer pages.
“Two consultants told us to add more pages. Digital Squad told us to delete 34,000 of them from Google. I genuinely thought they had misunderstood the business. Traffic quadrupled.”