Case Study: What Can Go Wrong with Your Website's Online Visibility and How to Fix It
- Oksana Gulyk
- May 3
- 3 min read
Updated: May 4
Recently I worked on an structured audit and technical fixes for one of my clients website, a software vendor specializing in network automation, DDI, and IPAM. The company serves enterprise and telco segments, and their products form an automation layer for network infrastructure. Here's an honest breakdown of what I found and what needed to be fixed.
Table of Contents
Problem 1: Millions of Junk Pages in Google's Index
The first thing I saw in Search Console was alarming: over 1.6 million pages with the status "Not indexed" and another 665,000 already in the index. For a corporate product website with no blog or large catalog, these numbers are a disaster.
It turned out the server was returning an HTML response with a 200 status code for any URL, even non-existent ones. Google started crawling and indexing everything: random parameters, made-up paths, test URLs.
Fix: Configure proper 404/410 responses for non-existent pages so Googlebot understands the page doesn't exist.
Problem 2: The Server Was Blocking Tracking Parameters
Another unpleasant discovery: the server was blocking URLs that contained query parameters such as utm_source, gclid, gtm_debug, and others. This meant:
UTM tags from ad campaigns weren't working
Google Ads couldn't pass conversion data
GTM couldn't be debugged
In practice, all paid marketing was running blind.
Fix: Work with developers to update the server configuration so tracking parameters are no longer blocked.
Problem 3: Cloudflare Was Blocking AI Bots via robots.txt
The site uses Cloudflare, which has a panel feature called Managed Rules for AI Bots. It was automatically adding disallow rules for AI crawlers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others.
For an enterprise software vendor that wants to appear in AI-powered search and be mentioned by language models when users ask about DDI, IPAM, or network automation, this was a step in the wrong direction.
Fix: Disable the automatic AI bot blocking in Cloudflare settings.
Problem 4: Sitemap Chaos
Search Console had dozens of sitemaps registered, most of them outdated, invalid, or duplicate. Google was attempting to process them, hitting errors, and creating unnecessary noise in the crawl budget.
Fix: Delete all outdated sitemaps, keep only the current one, and verify it's being generated correctly by the CMS.
Problem 5: Incorrect Schema Markup
The site had Local Business schema installed, which makes no sense for a global software vendor. On top of that, every page had two JSON-LD blocks: one new (correct) one, and one old one left over from the SEOmatic plugin.
Two competing schema blocks create confusion for Googlebot and risk having both ignored.
Fix:
Remove the old SEOmatic JSON-LD
Implement the correct schema types: Organization for the company and Software Application for each product
Apply the updated markup to key pages: homepage and individual product pages
Problem 6: GTM Was Set Up But Not Installed on the Site
A GTM container existed, tags were configured inside it, but the container itself was never connected to the website. Everything that had been set up in GTM simply wasn't firing.
Fix: Prepare a technical brief for developers to install the GTM container on the site.
How to Fix Website Online Visibility: Key Lessons From a Real Audit
Technical issues are often invisible without an audit. The site looked fine and worked normally, but underneath were several critical errors that made SEO and analytics practically useless.
AI visibility matters even for niche vendors. If your potential buyer asks an AI "what is a DDI solution" or "compare IPAM platforms," you need to show up in the answer. Blocking AI bots closes that channel entirely.
Two schema sources equal zero schema. Conflicting JSON-LD blocks are a common issue after CMS migrations or plugin changes. Always verify that old versions have been removed.
GTM without installation is just an empty box. No matter how many tags you configure, if the container isn't connected to the site, nothing fires.
For the framework behind this diagnostic approach, see the free book in the Library →
Working on your website's online visibility and not sure where the gaps are?
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