Where they started
A rentals portal with real inventory and steady demand, quietly bleeding crawl equity every week. Listings expire fast (a flat gets rented, the page goes offline) and the site was answering every expired URL with a raw 404. That was a few thousand fresh 404s a week, all of them pages Google had recently indexed and was still checking. On the other side of the problem, the newest inventory was the hardest for Google to reach: infinite-scroll pagination with no crawlable page-2, so anything past the first screen of a city depended on the sitemap alone to get found. The tell was in the logs: fresh listings took about nine days to index, and on a rentals site nine days is often the whole life of the listing. Half the inventory was surfacing after it had already been rented.
What we did
- Wrote a listing-lifecycle rule for the day a page dies. An expired listing no longer 404s. If the area still has inventory, it 301s to the neighborhood or building page that ranks for the same intent; only genuinely dead-end URLs return 410. That stopped the weekly flood of soft-signal 404s and kept the link equity inside the site.
- Killed the pagination trap. Infinite scroll got a real, crawlable paginated path underneath it, so Google could walk a city’s inventory instead of guessing at it from the sitemap. Deep listings stopped depending on a once-a-day file to be discovered.
- Rebuilt the sitemap around freshness, not the whole catalog. New and recently-changed listings were prioritized and pinged on publish, so the crawler learned where the new inventory was the day it went live rather than a crawl cycle later.
- Built 12 links, deliberately few. A handful of regional property and housing references, aimed at the hub pages the expired listings now redirect into. On this site links were the supporting move. The constraint was indexation latency, and links do not fix latency.
Indexation latency dropped from about nine days to about one within the first two months, and traffic climbed steadily from there as fresh listings started ranking while they were still rentable. The honest limit: this only pays off when your inventory turns over fast enough that a nine-day lag actually costs you rentals. Here it did, so freshness, not content volume, was the whole job.