Technical SEO cleanup for two Laravel travel websites
After a difficult migration history, two travel websites had canonical, sitemap, redirect and indexation problems. We cleaned up the technical foundation as part of ongoing maintenance.
The same two travel websites we maintain long-term carried SEO baggage from earlier migrations: search engines were seeing duplicate, staging and non-canonical URLs alongside the real pages.
The challenge
None of the individual issues was dramatic; together they blurred the sites’ picture in search engines:
- Google indexed several versions of the same page — with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, and even on the staging subdomain.
- The two sites shared one codebase, and the sitemaps mixed one site’s URLs into the other’s.
- Pages carried duplicate meta description tags, and many articles had no H1 heading at all.
- Search results showed the bare domain instead of the site name, with the wrong icon — small things that quietly cost clicks.
- Structured data was missing, internal links pointed at non-canonical URLs, and the
.htaccesscarried years of legacy rules nobody could explain.
What we did
As part of the maintenance engagement we ran a full technical SEO audit, then worked through the findings systematically:
- Added and corrected canonical tags, aligned www / non-www and trailing-slash behaviour, and took the staging site out of the index.
- Rebuilt
robots.txtand the XML sitemaps so each site declares exactly its own URLs, with noindex handling for search pages. - Removed the duplicated meta descriptions, added the missing structured data, and fixed how the sites appear in Google — proper site name and icon instead of a bare domain.
- Fixed missing H1s, cleaned internal links to point at canonical URLs, repaired redirect behaviour including
index.php, and cleared the legacy.htaccessrules. - Supported cleanup and re-indexing actions in Google Search Console.
The outcome
Search engines now crawl one consistent set of production URLs per site, duplicate and staging URLs dropped out of the picture, and the sites have a clean technical base for any future content work.
Technical hygiene like this is part of what “someone owns the platform” means in our Laravel maintenance engagements — not a separate project.
More case studies
industry
Travel & hospitality
tech stack
Laravel, Nginx, Google Search Console
service
Maintenance & Support
Want results like these for your application?
Start with a System Risk Check — a fixed-price technical audit of your application with a written, prioritised report. The report is yours, whatever you decide next.
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