The URL change that wiped their traffic, and the rebuild built not to repeat it

A previous developer moved Aitac's course pages from readable slugs onto numeric codes. No redirects. No metadata carried across. Organic traffic fell from about 2,500 visits a month to 180, inside a single month. Nobody had to diagnose it afterwards, because there was nothing subtle about it. Owner Jim Borle's read on the people who did it is the first line of this engagement's brief.

That history is why every URL decision here was slow. Aitac is the face-to-face brand, Your Licence is the online one, and the two domains had been splitting backlinks and topical authority between them for years. Underneath sat two parallel legacy URL structures, /engineering/ and /course-directory/engineering-courses/, which had the site cannibalising itself on telehandler licence, boiler licence, EWP and confined space. The platform was custom Laravel maintained by an external developer whose work had declined to band-aid fixes, and every change needed a Jira ticket that, in Jim's words, went in the bin.

Then in January 2026 the site was hacked. The attacker filled it with spurious product pages, and the Ahrefs crawl inflated to roughly 8,000 pages against a real course count near 160. Cloudflare went on after the hack and may have been blocking Screaming Frog. Ahrefs put the site health score at 6. We ruled that score unjustified rather than reporting it, because a crawl of a hacked site behind a possible bot block is not evidence of anything. We asked Elizabeth for an authoritative URL list instead, and would not finalise a redirect map without one.

The rest of the audit was more ordinary and just as expensive. The homepage was ranking for queries that belonged on their own pages: dangerous goods, rigging courses, hoist training, skid steer training, traffic controller course. Over 100 keywords sat at positions 3 to 10 with nothing done to them.

• 11,700 pages not indexed, of which 9,000 were /shopping/ 404s. Roughly 2,000 more were crawled and not indexed, mostly pagination.
• dev.aitac.edu.au was indexable, and so was store.aitac.edu.au. A pre-existing vendor oversight, flagged to the client to fix before any cutover.
• 11 orphan pages with no internal links pointing at them.
• Domain Rating 32, down 10 year on year, on 187 referring domains after losing 50 in twelve months. Some of the remaining links pointed at broken pages.
• Your Licence carried 99 legitimate referring domains against 269 spam ones, and its own traffic had fallen to near zero in February 2024 for reasons still not established.
• No blog, no FAQs, no location pages, no team page, no reviews on site. Zero informational traffic and no trust signals of any kind.
• Google Business Profiles at 3.7 and 3.9 stars across 37 reviews between them.

A rebuild judged on one thing: not repeating history. V1 went live on 2 June 2026 as a staging build for the client's own team to pull apart, and the public cutover is still gated on their sign-off. What follows is the migration groundwork, which is where the whole risk sits.

Non-brand terms only. Before is the June to August 2025 window, after is 1 May to 26 July 2026, both straight out of Search Console on the main domain. Plant and ticket terms are how this audience actually searches: they type the machine, not the qualification.

Clicks on aitac.edu.au went 1,003 in June 2025 to 1,040 in June 2026. Across both domains the June figure was 1,258, up 3.4% year on year and 1.3% on May. Average position on the main domain moved from about 34 to about 14. Top pages after V1 were the homepage, reach stacker, concrete placing boom, telehandler and the two dangerous goods pages, all on the new /category/.../course/ URLs, which is the confirmation that the new structure indexes and ranks.

Three head terms went backwards, and we would rather explain them than bury them. c6 ticket, tower crane licence and materials hoist ticket each fell from about position 1 to 8 or 9. The cause is visible in the data: the ranking URL moved off the homepage and onto the new dedicated course pages, so the page Google had been trusting for two years handed the query to a page it had known for weeks. All three stayed on page one throughout. That is a normal migration signature, and on the rank tracker the same month read 62 keywords up against 49 down across 261 tracked terms.

On the other side of the ledger the mapping worked as intended. Crane licences went 12 to 1, c6 crane 11 to 1, dangerous goods training 10 to 1 and crane truck licence 16 to 3, all onto pages that did not exist before. Those are the same queries the homepage used to absorb.