Where they started
The product was a developer tool with genuinely good documentation: hundreds of pages covering setup, errors, and configuration, all written by engineers who used the thing daily. The problem was that all of it lived on docs. as a separate subdomain, built on a different platform, with almost no links pointing back to the marketing site and none pointing the other way. Google treated the two as strangers. So the docs ranked for a handful of exact-match queries and nothing else, while the main site had the links and the authority but nothing worth ranking. Support-intent searches (“[product] connection timeout error”, “how to configure webhooks in [product]”) were pulling in Stack Overflow and random blog posts instead of the official docs that answered them best.
What we did
- Merged the docs from
docs.example.comtoexample.com/docs/with a full 301 map, so the documentation’s traffic and the main domain’s authority stopped being two separate piles. This is the whole story: it consolidated real internal linking rather than inventing new authority. - Mapped support-intent queries to specific docs pages (error messages, “how to X”, integration setup) and made sure each had a page written to match how people actually type the problem into search.
- Added signup-adjacent CTAs to high-traffic docs pages, so a developer who arrived mid-problem had an obvious next step instead of a dead end at the bottom of an error reference.
- Built 12 links, on purpose and no more, to a few docs pages worth citing. The architecture was the lever here; more links would have been spend without a matching payoff.
The step you can see in month two is the migration clearing. The slope after it is the docs compounding now that they were part of a domain search engines already trusted. Traffic roughly doubled, keywords more than doubled, and DR barely moved. That is exactly right, because we didn’t buy authority; we stopped wasting the authority they already had.