Situation

AECOM’s website contained significant technical debt, including thousands of toxic backlinks, hundreds of 404 pages that were still receiving traffic, and systemic crawl inefficiencies caused by broken internal links and inconsistent page handling. These issues limited discoverability and slowed search systems’ ability to interpret the site.

Task

The objective was to perform a complete technical audit across all major templates, URL groups, and content types, identify the primary causes of crawl waste, and surface the structural issues preventing reliable indexing and retrieval-quality understanding.

Action

The site was crawled at scale, revealing traffic-receiving 404s, redirect inconsistencies, broken internal references, large pools of toxic backlinks, and sitemap irregularities. Technical recommendations were produced for consolidation of error pages, cleanup of broken paths, remediation of toxic links, refinement of canonical handling, and removal of crawl-waste patterns across templates and sections.

Result

The audit surfaced the core technical blockers responsible for crawl waste, discoverability issues, and reliability gaps across AECOM’s global content footprint. Corrective actions were mapped to engineering, content, and operations teams, providing a clear roadmap for cleanup and stabilization across core sections of the site.