From this one page. A share of the collection, not a company figure.
Why a ranking drop here was not an SEO inconvenience.
13 October to 14 November 2024. It has held position since.
A ranking we had to give up on purpose.
On 10 October 2024, a supply partner red-flagged the bottom-of-funnel term “skip the line” on a high-revenue collection and required us to remove every mention of it: from the page copy, from the metadata, and from the URL. We had been ranking first for that term, which was the reason the request existed.
Complying was not optional. The page carried 39% of the collection’s organic revenue at a 9.9% conversion rate, so the question was never whether to comply but how much of the ranking we could keep while doing it.
Compliance meant more than a word swap.
The page had been holding an average position of 1.1, which was exactly why the supply partner and competitors could not rank for the same term themselves. Complying meant more than a word swap: removing every mention from content, metadata and the URL, deleting and redirecting the dedicated page, and accepting the risk of a significant loss in traffic and revenue along the way.
It did not take long. Within three days of the restriction landing, average position had fallen from 1.1 to 3.8, and traffic and revenue followed it down. By 13 October 2024 the damage was fully visible in Search Console.
Five steps, all inside what the restriction actually said.
The restriction was on a specific term, not on the intent behind it, and search engines resolve intent rather than matching strings. The recovery was built on finding somewhere else for the same intent to live, then carrying every ranking signal the old page had earned across to it.
Find an alternate term
Researched an alternate bottom-of-funnel term with the same search intent and real search volume, with no partner restriction attached. “Priority access” answers the same query “skip the line” did, and nothing in the agreement reached it.
Redirect and rebuild the URL
Built a new page at a URL carrying the alternate term and 301-redirected the old one, so accumulated ranking signals transferred rather than being abandoned.
Rewrite content and metadata
Replaced the banned term throughout the copy, meta title and meta description with the alternate term, with a short on-page note that the two mean the same thing.
Keep the term in image alt text
The restriction covered live page content, not image alt text, so “skip the line” stayed there, preserving a relevance signal in the one place the agreement did not reach.
Update backlink anchor text
Updated anchor text on external backlinks carrying the banned term and pointed them at the new URL, signalling that the new page answered the query the old one used to.
Thirty-two days, start to finish.
Every date below is the day the work landed, not the day it was planned. The fixes themselves were executed inside about ten days; the thirty-two is how long the ranking took to come all the way back. The drop and the recovery are both visible in Search Console.
The supply partner issues the restriction, requiring the term’s removal from products, pages and the URL.
Three days on, the fall has fully landed: average position reads 3.8, and traffic and revenue have followed it down.
The alternate term is identified, the new page built, and redirects set up.
Content and metadata fully rewritten around the alternate term.
Image alt text and backlink anchor text updated.
Position recovers, and holds.
The page continues to hold its position, keeping the revenue channel stable while staying fully compliant with the partner’s restriction.
1.1
Average position · to 10 Oct 2024
3.8
Average position · 13 Oct 2024
1.3
Average position · 14 Nov 2024
Where the page had been sitting while the term was still on it.
Where compliance left it, three days after the restriction landed.
Recovered in 32 days, and holding since.
It had been at 1.1 before the change, so 1.3 is a recovery and not an improvement. Saying otherwise would be claiming credit for a problem we were handed.
This is the incident that made the case for IRIS.
Every step above was found by hand and executed by hand across products, pages, shoulder pages and metadata, and the audit is most of the work. That is the shape of problem I built IRIS for: it takes the same request in Slack, gates itself on its own confidence, and the workflow that took it on now resolves a typical fix in about 24 hours, down from roughly ten days.
See how IRIS worksThe drop and the recovery, in Search Console.
“Skip the line” and “priority access” are generic industry head terms and are named here. What a keyword like this is normally attached to is not: the supply partner, the attraction, the collection and the URL are withheld throughout this page, including in the screenshot above.
The whole recovery in 24 seconds.
The fall from 1.1, the five steps inside the restriction, and the climb back to 1.3.
- Google Search Console
- Google Keyword Planner
- Ahrefs
- Screaming Frog
- Looker Studio
Read the restriction narrowly and precisely, then work only inside what it actually says.
The instinct is to treat a partner request as a blanket ban and give up the ranking, or to ignore it and hope. Neither is necessary. The agreement covered live page content, and everything we did to recover the position was in the places it did not reach.
More case studies.
Constraints are usually the brief.
This one arrived as a partner restriction and left as a recovery plan. If something similar is sitting on your roadmap, it is worth half an hour.