Reboot-It had moved its store to Shopify. The move changed the site structure, the navigation and the content, and organic traffic dropped. Six months with another agency hadn't moved it.
Our first audit in May 2025 found the site working against itself. Google was indexing Shopify's internal search result pages, which are thin and close to duplicates of the collections. A full copy of the store on the myshopify.com domain was in Google too, so every page had a twin.
Then there was the spam. Bots were using Shopify's vendor URLs to create junk pages under /collections/vendors?q=, and about 18,000 spam backlinks pointed at fake pages ending in -k.html. It's a pattern we've seen on a lot of Shopify stores, and we've written about it.
The opportunity was clear:
Clean up what the migration left behind, then get the collection pages ranking for searches like "refurbished laptops" and "refurbished computers".
The technical brief went to Reboot-It in May 2025, two weeks after we started. The leftovers from the move came first.
Search result pages were set to noindex. The duplicate myshopify.com URLs were taken out of Google, with canonicals pointing to the main domain. Internal links that returned a 404 were fixed in the templates and navigation. The spam vendor pages and Shopify's sandbox URLs were blocked in robots.txt. The shop name came out of page titles where it was repeated.
We disavowed about 18,000 spam backlinks on 21 May 2025. Duplicate pages are one of the most common problems we find on Shopify, and here's why they matter.
We researched keywords in Ahrefs and checked them against Reboot-It's own rank tracking. The focus was searches from people ready to buy a refurbished device. Each one was mapped to one collection page, so no two pages were chasing the same term.
Laptops came first. Margins on refurbished phones are thin, so phones could wait.
"Refurbished laptops" went from position 7 to 4.4, and its clicks went from 624 to 1,014 (Search Console, Australia, July to September, year on year).
We work in 4 month rounds. Month one is research. Then come content briefs, Reboot-It reviews them, and the pages go live. Each round covers 6 pages.
Round one went live in June and July 2025: the homepage plus the refurbished laptops, MacBooks, computers, monitors and tablets collections. Round two went up in January 2026: cheap laptops, Dell laptops, Apple iPads, Lenovo laptops, HP laptops and all in one desktops. Reboot-It picked the round two pages.
The refurbished computers collection went from position 8.5 to 5.8, and from 975 clicks to 1,462. It's the same round-based process we run on every Shopify SEO account.
A migration can undo years of rankings. Fix the technical problems first, then the content work has something to build on.
Spam pages and spam links don't clear themselves. Shopify stores attract both, so block the URLs and disavow the links before you spend money on content.
Six pages a round sounds slow. Two rounds in, twelve of the store's most important pages had been rewritten, each one aimed at a search people make when they're ready to buy.
Final word
For Reboot-It, the job was to get back what the move to Shopify cost, then go past it. The clean-up came first. The collection pages came next, 6 at a time.
If your store has moved platform and the traffic hasn't come back, start with an SEO audit. If the move is still ahead of you, see how we handled Crumpler's migration.
Want to know what this could look like for your brand? Let's talk.
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