SBN Website Optimization:
Technical SEO
Overview
The technical layer of an SEO project is rarely visible to visitors — but it determines how effectively search engines can crawl, understand, and surface a site. For SBN, this phase involved resolving a significant indexing problem, preserving link authority during the site’s restructure, and implementing structured data that opened the door to rich results across Google Search.
Indexing & De-indexing
The most significant technical issue on the site was invisible from the front end. Over years of operation, the Wix Events widget had automatically generated a standalone page for every event SBN published — and none of those pages had ever been de-indexed. By the time the audit was completed, over 300 pages were sitting in Google’s index, the vast majority of them outdated event pages with no current relevance.
Every outdated event page was submitted for de-indexing via Google Search Console, with nofollow and noindex robots meta tags applied before deletion. To prevent the problem from recurring, the Wix Events widget was configured to apply nofollow/noindex tags to all newly created event pages by default — so future event pages never enter the index in the first place.
New and updated pages were submitted for manual indexing through Google Search Console, and sitemaps were submitted after every major structural update to keep Google’s picture of the site accurate and current.
301 Redirects & Link Authority Preservation
Before any outdated page was deleted, each URL was checked for accumulated link authority. Pages that had earned external backlinks were given 301 redirects pointing to the most relevant new destination — rather than simply being removed and losing the equity they had built.
The clearest example was /bat-fest, which had accumulated 19 external incoming links. Rather than discarding that authority, the page was redirected to /upcoming-events before the old URL was removed, transferring the link equity to a page that actively serves visitors. Across the full site restructure, 75 redirects were configured in total.
Schema Markup
Structured data was implemented across the site in three layers. Breadcrumbs schema was added to every page, giving Google clear navigational context for the site’s architecture. FAQ schema was applied to all main pages containing FAQ sections, making each eligible for rich results in Google Search. Additional schema types were applied where relevant — including event schema on the Upcoming Events page, which is updated each month as new events are published.
All schema implementations were validated in Google Search Console with zero errors reported.
Bing Webmaster Tools
The same indexing and cleanup work was replicated in Bing Webmaster Tools: an updated sitemap was submitted, outdated URLs were de-indexed, and new and updated pages were submitted for immediate indexing. Bing’s Site Scan tool was used to surface and resolve any remaining crawl errors, technical issues, and SEO warnings — ensuring clean, consistent coverage across both major search engines.
What This Made Possible
Reducing the indexed page count from 300+ down to a clean, relevant set addressed two problems at once. It gave Google a much clearer signal about what SBN’s site is actually about — removing years of accumulated noise that had diluted the site’s topical focus. It also freed up crawl budget: Google allocates a finite amount of crawling resources to each site, and those resources were being spent on hundreds of outdated event pages with no current value. Clearing the index directed Googlebot’s attention toward the pages that actually matter, improving the likelihood that new and updated content gets discovered and indexed promptly.
Preserving link authority through 301 redirects ensured that accumulated backlinks continued to support the site’s domain credibility rather than disappearing on deletion. And implementing validated schema markup across the site opened the door to rich results — increasing SBN’s eligibility for enhanced search appearances that go beyond a standard organic listing.