Cameron & Cameron
When a theme choice creates a technical SEO disaster
A business consultancy website running an e-commerce ghost shop in the background. Over 19,000 junk pages in Google's index. Domain rating of zero. Found by accident - fixed properly.
View the live site →The Situation
The developer hadn't left - he just hadn't noticed what he'd built
Cameron & Cameron are a business consultancy. Their website had been built by a developer who, when it came to choosing a theme, picked one he liked the look of - a WooCommerce-based theme. Whether the implications of that choice were fully understood at the time is hard to say, but the result was a business consultancy website running a full e-commerce stack it had absolutely no use for.
Glenn happened to ask me to take a look while I was already helping him with another website of his. It didn't take long to see something was off. On the surface the Ahrefs health score was sitting at a respectable 91 - but surface scores don't tell the whole story. When I dug deeper, the picture changed entirely.
Thousands of WooCommerce-generated product pages — clothing, jackets and bags priced at £420 to £490 - indexed under the Cameron & Cameron domain. None of it had anything to do with the business. Google had been spending its crawl budget on a ghost shop.
The PageSpeed scores on the old site told another part of the story: 52 on desktop performance and just 32 on mobile. Slow, bloated, and quietly wasting any organic potential it might have had. The site needed a complete rethink regardless of the WooCommerce problem.
The old site - a business consultancy website displaying clothing and bags for sale, with no relation to the actual business.
The Detail
What these junk pages actually looked like
These weren't just surplus product pages - they were parameter-laden URLs generated by WooCommerce's wishlist and cart functionality. Each variation of every product action had created a unique, indexable URL. Google had dutifully tried to crawl all of them.
cameron.me.uk/product/cotton-t-shirt/?remove-wishlist-item=77128b74e0f16137daa860f83c222ac0&_wpnonce=ea5d56dfcc
cameron.me.uk/product/cotton-jacket/?remove-wishlist-item=404359aabfd6b76ad43f09d4945425a9&_wpnonce=eac9d6c748&add-to-cart=217
cameron.me.uk/shop/?remove-wishlist-item=83c0eec4b23bb9e18c03ebdcf638ef25&_wpnonce=0d114a5d2d&add-to-cart=73
cameron.me.uk/shop/page/2/?remove-wishlist-item=510de147126512d2498b35690aa615b2&_wpnonce=fe0f5273e8&add-to-cart=253
Every one of these URLs was being treated as a unique page by Google. Multiply that across hundreds of products and every possible parameter combination, and you arrive at the scale of the problem.
(junk WooCommerce URLs)
properly indexed
GSC indexing chart showing the volume of junk pages and the steady decline as they are deindexed over time.
The Work
Remove, rebuild, and give Google something worth indexing
The priority was clear: get the junk out of Google's index and rebuild the site on solid foundations. WooCommerce and all associated data was removed entirely. The site was rebuilt in WordPress with the consultancy's actual services front and centre.
Beyond the rebuild, a set of interactive tools were built into the site to give visitors genuine reasons to engage - an EBITDA calculator, a business valuation calculator aimed at exit planning, and a DISC assessment tool. These aren't decorative features; they're genuinely useful resources for the kind of clients Cameron & Cameron work with, and they give the site something to offer beyond a list of services.
The work on content has been collaborative. Glenn is now actively publishing content on the site, and we've worked together on a content plan to make sure that effort is well directed. Coupled with consistent review responses and social media activity, the site now has real momentum behind it - the kind that compounds over time rather than spiking and fading.
It's worth being honest about the timescales on the technical cleanup though. Deindexing thousands of pages is not an overnight process - Google works through it gradually, and even after the rebuild there were still a significant number of old URLs being processed. At the time of writing, around 17,000 pages still show as crawled but not indexed, and these are expected to continue clearing over time.
- Full WordPress rebuild removing all WooCommerce remnants
- Technical SEO audit and cleanup of indexed junk pages
- Robots.txt and canonical configuration to prevent recurrence
- Site architecture rebuilt around consultancy services
- EBITDA calculator built into the site
- Business valuation calculator for exit planning
- DISC assessment tool for visitor engagement
- Content plan developed collaboratively with Glenn
- Google Search Console configured and monitored
- Ongoing maintenance — plugins, security, backups
19,400+ junk pages in Google's index
WooCommerce installed with no purpose
Crawl budget wasted on irrelevant content
No GSC configured
210 legitimate pages properly indexed
WooCommerce fully removed
41 backlinks from 22 linking websites
GSC active and monitored
Where Things Stand
Organic growth from a standing start
The site launched from zero organic presence in late October 2025. The GSC data since then tells a straightforward story: steady, genuine growth in a domain that previously had none.
These aren't dramatic numbers - but they're real ones, built on a clean foundation rather than inflated by junk. The cleanup is still ongoing, and as Google continues to process the old URLs the site's authority and visibility will continue to improve.
(Oct 2025 – Mar 2026)
from organic search
(improving as rankings settle)
since rebuild
(just 1 error remaining)
from 22 linking sites
All data from Google Search Console. The previous site had no GSC configured prior to October 2025 as the site simply was not ranking at all, so there is no historic baseline - this represents growth from a cold start.
Want to see the finished result?
View the Cameron & Cameron website →Client Feedback
In Glenn's words
"Ed has always been amazingly helpful to everyone to drive results on the web in the time I have known him; helping local businesses with small issues at no charge demonstrating a true gentlemanly attitude. More recently taking my own humble web presence from a domain rating of 0 to 3 in a matter of weeks inspiring the confidence that he knows what he is doing; and demonstrating the application of that knowledge to drive business results - which is why we invest so we have no hesitation in recommending Ed as a 5% performer for your web solution needs."
Inherited a technical mess?
Sometimes the work isn't building something new - it's fixing what was left behind. Either way, it starts with an honest look at what's actually there.
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