Case Study

Kärcher

International domain consolidation that grew Authority Score from 23 to 74 and consolidated 731.6K backlinks onto a single domain.

Client

Kärcher

Industry

Enterprise/E-commerce

Services

Technical SEO

Kärcher domain consolidation

The opportunity

One global brand, dozens of fragmented domains

Kärcher, the German family-owned global market leader in cleaning technology, operated separate websites for each country market. Domains like karcher.be and karcher.nl each built authority independently, but none benefited from the brand’s global scale. Link equity was scattered across dozens of country-code TLDs.

The company planned a global domain consolidation, migrating all markets onto a unified kaercher.com structure, following the model of brands like IKEA. We led the SEO strategy for the Belgian and Dutch markets, covering migration planning, URL mapping, content hub architecture, and redirect strategy across Dutch, French, and Netherlands language variants.

Challenges identified

A high-stakes migration with no room for error

This project combined six migration types simultaneously: replatforming, site redesign, URL structure change, site architecture change, domain change, and consolidation. Each one carries ranking risk on its own, combining all six required meticulous planning.

  • Fragmented domain authority: backlinks spread across ccTLDs rather than consolidated on a single domain
  • Basic site architecture: product pages organised as flat grids with limited topical structure
  • Duplicate content across markets: Belgian Dutch content largely mirrored Netherlands content, creating cannibalisation risk
  • Hreflang implementation critical for signalling language/region targeting to prevent cross-market competition

Our approach

Consolidate, restructure, protect

Every identified challenge became a requirement with clear specifications. The Belgian and Dutch sites migrated to subfolder structures: kaercher.com/be/ (Dutch), kaercher.com/be-fr/ (French), and kaercher.com/nl/.

Content Hub Architecture

We advised Kärcher to replace basic product grids with comprehensive content hubs. Key category pages became SEO entry points linking to all related content: product ranges, buying guides, feature explanations, accessories, and tips. This created clusters of closely related content covering the full scope of user intent around each product category, what we call topical authority.

Redirect Strategy & Migration Planning

Given the volume of product pages across B2C and B2B catalogues, plus multiple language versions, the redirect scope was substantial. We executed 301 redirects at page level rather than relying on pattern-based rules, ensuring precise signal transfer for each URL. Extensive pre-migration and post-migration checklists covered URL inventory, redirect implementation, staging verification, and post-launch monitoring.

Authority Score
23
Consolidated backlinks
0.0K
SEMrush status
Industry Leader